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REMEMBERING TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE AND THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION

IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

Matthew J. Clavin

Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of American University

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the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

History

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Andrew

Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences .5* t - i______Date 2005

American University

Washington, D.C. 20016

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Matthew J. Clavin

2005

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “MEN OF COLOR, TO ARMS!”:

REMEMBERING TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE AND THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION

IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

Matthew J. Clavin

ABSTRACT

Haiti’s Declaration of Independence at the opening of the nineteenth century

marked the end of a slave rebellion of unprecedented size and scope. It was the

culminating event of a racial and social revolution, which had a profound impact on the

slave societies of the Atlantic world. The effect of the Saint Domingue, or Haitian

Revolution, on the United States was in particular tremendous. This was especially the

case during the Civil War, when the American people at last confronted the racial

paradox that defined their short history. Public memory of the Haitian Revolution aided

in the construction of two competing and racialized national identities during the war.

African Americans and their radical white allies used the Haitian Revolution and

especially the indomitable black slave general Toussaint Louverture, to reinvent the

United States, imagining it as an enlightened, multiracial, and colorblind society in which

African Americans figured prominently as citizens, soldiers, and men. Conversely, white

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. southerners employed the iconic event in the construction of a Confederate nation, which

was committed above all else to defending the institution of slavery and perpetuating

white racial supremacy.

This project explores the ways various publics appropriated opposing narratives

of the Haitian Revolution, through an examination of three major Civil War-era debates:

(1) violent abolitionism and secession; (2) black soldiery; and (3) emancipation. Popular

attention to the Haitian Revolution at the revolutionary and transforming time of the Civil

War reveals much about the construction and uses of historical memory, as well as its

role in conceptions of national identity. That this milestone in African American history

meant so much to the American people at such a defining moment illuminates moreover

the significance of black history and culture in the making of America. The brutal and

bloody war that ended slavery in the United States sparked an outpouring of public

remembering of past people and events. It was in remembering Toussaint and the Haitian

Revolution that the American people learned as much about themselves as they did about

the slave revolt that took place on Haiti more than a half-century before.

iii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledgements

Only those who have written a doctoral dissertation can appreciate the time,

effort, and assistance that goes into such an undertaking. While it is impossible to

mention all of the teachers, librarians, archivists, and friends that helped me complete this

long journey, I will never forget them. My greatest debt is to Karin Wulf, for her

guidance as both a scholar and advisor. The manuscript would not exist without her. Nor

would it appear in its current form without the assistance of three scholars who have led a

tidal of wave of historians into the field of Atlantic history. Ira Berlin, Douglas Egerton,

and Alison Games are in addition to being gifted intellectuals, gracious mentors who

have deeply affected both my thinking and writing. I would like to thank Alan Kraut

especially, for our laid-back conversations on history and graduate school. Both his

teaching and scholarship have made a lasting impression. I would like to thank Andrew

Lewis and the entire faculty of American University for providing support in every form

imaginable. Thank you also to Tyler Anbinder, Steve Balia, and Richard Stott at George

Washington University, and William Hudon, James Sperry, and George Turner of

Bloomsburg University for inspiring me to follow my dreams, no matter how far fetched.

Joshua Greenberg’s friendship has along with his advice and experience been invaluable,

and for this I will always be grateful.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Since the day I first arrived on the campus of American University, the institution

liberally supported my research, writing, and travel initiatives. The Department of

History, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate Leadership Council have all

provided significant financial support. Numerous libraries and archives across the United

States provided invaluable assistance. The Cosmos Club of Washington, D.C. gave me

my first research grant, and without it, I would not have known whether this topic was

worthy of pursuing. The intellectual and financial support I received from the American

Antiquarian Society, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Library Company of

Philadelphia, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, McNeil Center for Early American

Studies, Massachusetts Historical Society, Schomburg Center for Research in Black

Culture, and the Virginia Historical Society enabled me to imagine, research, and write

this dissertation. I am thankful for every day I spent at these wonderful centers of

learning, and am eager to return to each of them. Finally, I would be remiss to thank

those people who ultimately provided me with the inspiration to complete this enterprise,

the men and women who throughout history defied convention in recognizing the

commonality and fighting for the equality of all people.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... iv

LIST OF FIGURES...... viii

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION...... 1

PART ONE: RACE, SECTION, AND REBELLION: OPENING THE CIVIL WAR OF WORDS

2. “THE INEFFACEABLE CHARACTERS OF BLOOD”: ABOLITIONISTS AND THE SEMIOTICS OF BLACK REVOLUTION...... 31

3. “HORRORS OF ST. DOMINGO”: MEMORY AND THE MAKING OF THE CONFEDERATE NATION...... 65

PART TWO: “MEN OF COLOR, TO ARMS!”: DEBATING BLACK SOLDIERS

4. “WILL THE BLACKS FIGHT”: HISTORY, HAITI, AND THE ARGUMENT FOR BLACK SOLDIERS...... 96

5. AMERICAN TOUSSAINTS: BLACK SOLDIERS, BLACK MEMORY, BLACK MEN...... 129

PART THREE: EMANCIPATION AND THE SECOND HAITIAN REVOLUTION

6. “HAS THE STORY NO LESSON FOR US?”: HAITI AND THE REINVENTING OF AMERICA...... 169

7. “A REPETITION OF SAN DOMINGO”: CONFEDERATES, COPPERHEADS, AND THE HORROR OF EMANCIPATION...... 207

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BIBLIOGRPAHY...... 252

vii

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Figure Page

2.1 John Relly Beard, Life o f Toussaint L ’Ouverture, the Negro Patriot o f Hayti, 1854 ...... 35

5.1 Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, 1805 ...... 151

5.2 Joseph T. Wilson, Black Phalanx, 1890...... 151

7.1 Adalbert Volck, Writing the Emancipation Proclamation, 1864 ...... 221

viii

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INTRODUCTION

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a French captain of engineers made a

surprising discovery, high in the Jura Mountains of eastern France. Under the chapel of

the Chateau de Joux, a stone citadel erected by the Roman army more than seven

centuries before, lay the headless remains of a human body. The skull was unattached but

was close by, resting on a mantelpiece in the center of an old subterranean prison cell.

This was no ordinary find. This was extraordinary. This was the corpse of Toussaint

Louverture.1 The discovery of these remains was ironic. Thousands of miles away, on the

other side of the Atlantic Ocean, a young and emerging Republic stood on the verge of

ruin. The issue of slavery had brought the United States to the brink of a sectional war.

While northern states prohibited the institution, it thrived in southern ones. Debate over

the westward expansion of the South’s “peculiar institution” threatened to rip the nation

in two. Americans were desperate, and in need of help. It was as if Toussaint, the soldier

who a half-century earlier guided the slaves of Haiti to liberty and national independence

had returned from the grave to lend support, to bring peace to yet another nation

James Redpath, Toussaint L ’Ouverture: Biography and Autobiography (Boston: James Redpath, 1863), 357. 1

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destroying itself over slavery.2

The resurrection of Toussaint’s body coincided with an American revival of

interest in him and the social and political revolution he led. In the decade before the

Civil War, Americans in both sections expressed popular interest in Toussaint and the

Saint Domingue, or Haitian Revolution, in public orations, printed texts, and visual

images. During the war, this revival became an explosion, as politicians, planters,

ministers, soldiers, and slaves invoked the revolution and put its memory to various uses.

This dissertation examines the construction of American memory of Toussaint and the

Haitian Revolution on the eve of and during the Civil War and tells the story of the

contest that ensued.

W. E. B. Du Bois wrote nearly a hundred years after the Haitian Revolution, “The

role which the great Negro Toussaint, called L’Ouverture, played in the history of the

United States has seldom been fully appreciated.”3 Du Bois pointed to Toussaint because

of the model of black freedom he both promised and delivered. However, DuBois’s

emphasis on Toussaint also highlights his significance as a historical actor and an

important figure in other eras. His memory was as powerful as his leadership had proved.

Today with the exception of scholars, graduate students, and committed black history

buffs, Americans have largely forgotten Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution. American

history textbooks typically devote no more than a line to the man and the event; and for

those familiar with recent Haitian history, it is difficult to reconcile the most democratic

2 1 employ “Toussaint” throughout, as the name was the appellation nineteenth-century Americans used most commonly. 3 W. E. B. Dubois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896; reprint, Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 70.

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eighteenth-century revolution with this distressed Caribbean nation.4 But in the first half

of the nineteenth century, Americans wrote, read, and talked about the Caribbean slave

revolt that began in 1791 and led to thirteen years of bloodshed between nearly a half

million black slaves, tens of thousands of mulattoes, and French, English, and Spanish

colonists and soldiers. When the bloodletting finally ceased in 1804, black leaders and

former slaves of the one-time French colony Saint Domingue declared national

independence and gave their new nation the name used by the island’s original Arawak

inhabitants, Haiti.

Haiti’s Declaration of Independence at the opening of the nineteenth century

marked the end of a slave rebellion of unprecedented size and scope. It was the

culminating event of a racial and social revolution, which had a profound impact on the

slave societies of the Atlantic world. The effect of the Saint Domingue, or Haitian

Revolution, on the United States was tremendous. This is not surprising, given the similar

histories of the first two republics in the Western Hemisphere. The United States and

Haiti share much in common. Most obvious is that protracted violence was required to

end slavery in both nations. It should come as no surprise then, that when the American

people fought an unthinkable civil war over slavery they were well versed in the narrative

of the Haitian Revolution and knew the name of the indomitable black slave general,

Toussaint Louverture. Both were rhetorical touchstones around which public discourse

revolved, fundaments of the national dialogue on race, slavery, emancipation, and war.

4 On the “silencing” of the Haitian Revolution, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot,Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). Textbooks include, Gary Nash and Julie Roy Jeffrey, The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, Volume One - to 1877, 5th ed. (New York: Longman, 1998), 273; Alan Brinkley,American History, Volume One— to 1877, 10th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill College, 1999), 243-44; James Kirby Martin,America and Its Peoples: A Mosaic in the Making, Volume O n e -to 1877, 4th (Newed. York: Longman, 2001), 218.

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Public memory of the Haitian Revolution aided in the construction of two

competing and racialized national identities during the war. African Americans and their

radical white allies used Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution to both imagine and

reinvent the United States, making it into an enlightened, multiracial, and colorblind

society in which former slaves figured prominently as citizens, soldiers, and men.

Conversely, white southerners employed iconic event in the construction of a

Confederate nation, which was committed above all else to defending the institution of

slavery and perpetuating white racial supremacy. These separate and competing

nationalisms defied the sectional contest that took place on the battlefield; that is, the

various ways people remembered the Haitian Revolution at times had little to do with the

section in which they lived. In one case, for example, slaves, free blacks, and white

abolitionists in the Confederate and Border States amplified the idealistic national dreams

of their northern allies. In another, a vocal group of northern Democrats identified with

Confederates’ ambitions of an exclusivist white nation.

Assorted constituencies rooted these racialized nationalities in opposing narrative

models of the Haitian Revolution. I call the first rendering the Heroic Model. In it,

English, French, Haitian, and American abolitionists portrayed Toussaint as a Great Man,

a racial synecdoche of the world’s most successful slave revolt, who served as a foil for

the trope of the “horrors of St. Domingo.” When Toussaint embodied the character,

virtue, and potential of liberated black slaves, he represented the most optimistic hopes of

a truly free and multiracial society. Without him, the memory of revolutionary violence

stood alone as evidence of its horrors. The second narrative may be called the

Apocalyptical Model. It told of the horrible acts Haitian slaves committed against white

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men, women, and children, following the abolition of slavery by the French government.

The dominant narrative throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, slaveowners

and their allies on both sides of the Atlantic used it to warn of the violent and suicidal

effects of the abolition of slavery.

“Men of Color, to Arms!” is a study in Atlantic history that responds and

contributes primarily to three developing historical literatures: the history and legacy of

the Haitian Revolution; memory; and nationalism. A discussion of each of these

historiographies will provide a conceptual framework for assessing the chapters that

follow. The trend of writing history within an Atlantic paradigm has peaked scholars’

interest in the Haitian Revolution, the most democratic revolution in an age of

revolutions.5 Today literature on the Haitian Revolution is exploding, as scholars are

reconsidering its origins and outcomes, as well as its portents throughout the Atlantic

world.6 Much of the work on Haiti’s impact on early America explores the political

5 Scholars of the Atlantic world testify to the uniqueness of the Haitian Revolution. Franklin Knight writes, the revolution “represents the most thorough case study of revolutionary change anywhere in the history of the modem word.” “The Haitian Revolution,”American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (Febmary 2000): 103; David Patrick Geggus concurs: “Few revolutions in world history have had such profound consequences.” “The Haitian Revolution,” in Franklin Knight and Colin Palmer, eds.,The Modern Caribbean (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1989), 21. 6 Notable are: Roger Norman Buckley, ed.The Haitian Journal o f Lieutenant Howard, York Hussars, 1796-1798 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985); David Brion Davis, “American Equality and Foreign Revolutions,”Journal of American History 76, no. 3 (December 1989): Lament Dubois,Avengers o f the New World: The Story o f the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2004); Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: the Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); Monroe Fordham, “Nineteenth-Century Black Thought in the United States: Some Influences of the Santo Domingo Revolution,”Journal of Black Studies 6, no. 2 (December 1975): 115-126; David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds.A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); David Patrick Geggus, ed. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001); Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue 1793-1798 (London, 1982); Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story o f the Haitian People, 1492-1791 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978); Lester D. Langley,The Americas in the Age o f Revolution, 1750-1850 (New Haven, Connecticut: 1996); Donald R. Hickey, “America’s Response to the Slave Revolt in Haiti, 1791-1806,”Journal o f the Early Republic, 2 (1982): 361-79; David Nicholls,From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Color, and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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ramifications in the New Republic, or traces the path of Haitian refugees to places like

New Orleans and Baltimore.7 A number of important studies focus on African

Americans’ colonization of Haiti.• 8

This work joins two related historical conversations on the Haitian Revolution.

First is that which evaluates the fearful response of white Americans’ to Haiti’s violent

birth. The second considers the survival of black Haitians’ revolutionary ideology among

free and enslaved African Americans. In the first half of the nineteenth century, race

commonly informed Americans’ perspectives on the Haitian Revolution. Thus to

1979); Thomas O. Ott,The Haitian Revolution, 1789-1804 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973); Jan Pachonski and Revel K. Wilson,Poland’s Caribbean Tragedy: A Study of Polish Legions in the Haitian War of Independence 1802-1803 (New York: East European Monographs, 1986); Althea de Peuch Parham, ed. and trans. My Odyssey: Experiences o f a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions (Baton Rouge, 1959; George Tyson, Jr., ed.,Toussaint L ’Ouverture (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: 1973); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making o f the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Susan Buck-Morris, “Hegel and Haiti,”Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer 2000): 821-65. 7 Eugene Genovese,From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge and London, 1979); Alfred N. Hunt,Haiti’s Influence of Antebellum America', Roger G. Kennedy, Orders From France: the Americans and the French in a Revolutionary World, 1780-1820 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), Chapter Four; Kimberly S. Hanger, “Conflicting Loyalties: The French Revolution and Free People of Color in Spanish New Orleans,” in Gasper and Geggus, A Turbulent Time, 178-203; Paul LaChance, “The Politics of Fear: French Louisiana and the Slave Trade, 1786-1809,”Plantation Society 1, no. 2 (June 1979): 162-197; “Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Louisiana,” in Geggus,Impact o f the Haitian Revolution, 209-230', Michael S. Laguerre, Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), Chapter Two; Rayford W. Logan,The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776-1891 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941); Glenn O. Phillips, “Maryland and the Caribbean, 1634-1984: Some Highlights,”Maryland Historical Magazine 83, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 199-214; Tim Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti”Journal o f Southern History 61, no. 2 (May 1995): 209-48;A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations During the Early Republic (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2003); Charles C. Tansill, The United States and Santo Domingo, 1798-1873: A Chapter in Caribbean Diplomacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938); Mary Treudley, “The United States and Santo Domingo, 1789-1866,”Journal of Race Development VII (July and October 1916): 83-274; Trouillot,Silencing the Past; Michael Zuckerman, “The Power of Blackness: Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution in St. Domingue,” in Zuckerman, ed.,Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley and Oxford, 1993): 175-218; Ashli White, “ ‘A Flood of Impure Lava’: Saint Dominguan Refugees in the United States, 1791-1820.” (Ph.d. diss., Columbia University, 2003). 8 Christ Dixon,African America and Haiti; Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Connecticut: 2000); James O. Jackson, “The Origins of Pan-African Nationalism: Afro- American and Haytian Relations 1800-1863,” Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1976); Floyd J. Miller, Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975).

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understand the revolution’s impact on the United States, we must consider the

polarization of white and black memories of the unparalleled event. Categorizing

Americans’ memories of the Haitian Revolution along racial fault lines is a risky

proposition. Fluid and amorphous socially constructed ideas of race like “white” and

“black” are insufficient indicators of how individuals’ perceive themselves and others, as

we will see below. Nevertheless, a number of generalizations about the racialization of

nineteenth-century American memory using these categories are useful.

In the South and to a lesser extent in the North, whites’ fears of slave insurrection

were nearly ubiquitous. The specter of rebellion, Winthrop Jordan writes, presented “an

appalling world turned upside down, a crazy nonsense world of black over white, an anti

community which was the direct negation of the community as white men knew it.”9 The

pervasiveness of whites’ fears presents historians with a paradox, for after the early

national period African American slaves’ revolted infrequently. This fact led some

scholars in the century after emancipation to insist that white slaveowners treated their

slaves benevolently, and that in rare cases of whites’ cruel treatment of their human

property, slaves passively accepted their fate.10 In response to these early works and the

controversial thesis set forth by Stanley Elkins, historians have in recent decades

explored alternative, nonviolent forms of resistance, offering them as proof of the

9 Winthrop Jordan,White OverBlack: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 114. 10 Ulrich B. Phillips wrote that American slaves were “submissive” and “more or less contentedly slaves.” James Schouler found slaves docile, content, and possessing a “canine-like” attachment to their masters, and James Randall remarked on their “unprotesting submission.” Accordingly, they considered slave revolts “minimal in number, intensity, and significance.” Phillips,American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor Determined by the Plantation Regime (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1918), 341-42;Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1929), 196; Schouler,History of the United States of America, Under the Constitution, vol. 2 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1882), 264; Randall,The Civil War and Reconstruction (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1937), 53.

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ubiquitousness of slave subversion.11 From breaking tools and burning buildings, to

running away or threatening to do so in front of owners or slave buyers in order to

influence potential transactions, slaves’ actions give lie to owners’ paternalistic claims.

Though recent works on antebellum slave markets and the contested public space of

southern plantations are invaluable for bringing about a more realistic and nuanced

understanding of slavery, historians’ focus on non-violent forms of resistance has shifted

attention away from the impact of slave rebellions on the United States. 1 9

The Haitian Revolution gave white Americans good reason to fear rebellion,

despite the paucity of domestic insurrections. There were undeniable similarities between

the southern United States and colonial Saint Domingue. South Carolina Governor

Charles Pickney made this sentiment clear when addressing the white colonists of Saint

Domingue during the revolution. “When we recollect how nearly similar the situation of

the southern States and St. Domingo are in the profusion of slaves—that a day may arrive

when they may be exposed to the same insurrections—we cannot but sensibly feel for

11 Stanley Elkins,A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life Third Edition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976). For some of the varieties of slave resistance, see: John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South Revised and Enlarged Edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); W. Jeffrey Bolster,Blackjacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Stephanie Camp,Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976); Albert J. Raboteau,Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution ” in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Kenneth M. Stampp,The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1956). 12 Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2000). The search for alternative forms of resistance parallels the quest of historians in the twentieth century to discover evidence of slave revolts in early America. Classic accounts include: Herbert Aptheker,American Negro Slave Revolts, Fifth Edition (New York: International Publishers, 1987); Sylvia Frey,Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Peter H. Wood,Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975).

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your situation.”13 If demographic similarities were not enough to send shivers up the

spines of white Americans, in 1799 reports surfaced that the French government sought

Toussaint’s aid in launching a military invasion of the southern United States.14 Toussaint

opposed the invasion, for he was unwilling to alienate the powerful nation to the North,

whose support he would later require to rid the French from the island.15 Nevertheless,

his aspirations for black freedom threatened slavery wherever it existed.16 Toussaint

never participated in a slave rebellion outside of Haiti, but numbers of black and colored

veterans of the Haitian Revolution went on to defy imperial governments and armies

throughout the Atlantic world. In Martinique in December 1800, Jean Kina, a former

Haitian slave headed a “strange variety of rebellion” that officials quickly suppressed.17

A decade later, officials thwarted a slave conspiracy led by Edmond Thetis, a six-year

veteran of the Haitian army. In Spanish Florida, a black veteran of the Haitian Revolution

named George Biassou wandered the embattled colony at the head of a Spanish army.

Years earlier he led an army of Haitian slaves and Toussaint took orders from him. 1 8 The

always-paranoid Thomas Jefferson recorded in a letter the landing of two Haitians in

South Carolina, “with a design to excite an insurrection among the negroes.”19 After the

13 Ott, Haitian Revolution, 53. 14 Edward Stevens to Brigadier-General Sir Thomas Maitland, May 3, 1799, in “Letters of Toussaint Louverture and Edward Stevens, 1798-1800,” American Historical Review 16, no. 1 (October 1910): 64- 101. 15 This, indeed, convinced Stevens of the goodness of Toussaint, and may have thus encouraged U.S. support for Toussaint in subsequent years. Ott,Haitian Revolution, 108. 16 According to C. L. R. James, Toussaint planned to end the Atlantic slave trade by sailing to Africa, and “had sent millions of francs to American to wait for the day when he would be ready.”Black Jacobins, 265. 17 David Geggus, “The Slaves and Free Colored of Martinique during the Age of the French and Haitian Revolutions: Three Moments of Resistance,” in Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman, eds.,The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 289-95. 18 Jane G. Landers, “Rebellion and Royalism in Spanish Florida: The French Revolution on Spain’s Northern Colonial Frontier,” in Gaspar and Geggus,A Turbulent Time, 157-77. 19 Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds.,The Writings o f Thomas Jefferson Definitive Edition IX (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905), 275; for a lengthier treatment of

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United States Congress agreed to maintain diplomatic ties with Toussaint’s government,

Jefferson waxed pessimistically: “We may expect therefore black crews, and

supercargoes and missionaries thence into the southern states.” 20

For whites, the threat of a black army landing on American shores to conquer land

and liberate slaves was, as Douglas Egerton has shown, real, though it was more likely

that American slaves would mimic black Haitians.21 For more than a half-century whites

articulated their fears of a Second Haitian Revolution. These fears never subsided and

were, like heirlooms, passed down from generation to generation. Leading antebellum

southern publisher James D. B. De Bow described the Haitian Revolution as a “narrative

which frightened our childhood, and still curdles the blood to read.” One99 southern

diarist described a relative who was and had “always been afraid of negroes,” because “In

her youth the St. Domingo stories were indelibly printed on her mind.”23 Historians credit

white southerners’ anxiety over slave insurrection with promoting support for such public

policies as black colonization, the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, and even the

abolition of slavery itself. Jefferson at times suggested all three, writing, “if something is

not done, and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children.”24 Some suggest

other well-known Americans who feared a Franco-Haitian invasion of the South see Aptheker,American Negro Slave Revolts, 43-45. 20 Paul Leicester Ford, ed., Works o f Jefferson (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904-05), IX, 39. 21 Douglas Egerton, “The Empire of Liberty Reconsidered,” in James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter Onuf, ed., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 313-14. 22 “Hayti and the Haytiens,”De Bow’s Review 16, no. 1 (January 1854): 35. 23 Mary Boykin Chesnut,Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 211. 24 Jefferson to St. George Tucker, August 28, 1797, Barbara B. Oberg, ed.,The Papers o f Thomas Jefferson 29 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 519.

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it was this widespread fear that ultimately led to secession and the Civil War. 25 Allen

Trelease has traced the influence of such fears through Reconstruction.26 Nevertheless,

white southerners’ association of American slave revolts with the Haitian Revolution is

relevant here. This tradition renders the Civil War the largest slave revolt ever witnessed

in the United States, a Second Haitian Revolution in which hundreds of thousands of free

and enslaved black men armed themselves and took their freedom from white men.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, slave revolts, plots, and

conspiracies in the South served primarily as what French historian Pierre Nora calls

“lieux de memoires,” historical moments “where memory crystallizes and secretes

itself.”27 Conversations among participants, witnesses, journalists and others, before,

during, and after each episode, activated collective remembering of the Haitian

Revolution. Though incidents of American slave resistance frequently owed their

existence at least in part to the memory of the Haitian Revolution, it is essential to

remember that each in turn perpetuated its memory in their aftermath. Like a snowball

rolling downhill, each revolt, plot, or conspiracy that referenced the Haitian Revolution

both stimulated and eventually perpetuated its memory further. Whites’ reactions to well-

known African American slave conspiracies and revolts are instructive. Following

Gabriel’s failed attempt at insurrection in Richmond, Virginia in 1800, numbers of

politicians and newspaper writers drew comparisons between local events and those on

25 Steven Charming, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970); William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); Genovese,From Rebellion to Revolution, 27, 113-125. 26 Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995). 27 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” in Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally, eds.,History and Memory in African-American Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 284.

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Haiti.28 Just over a decade later in Louisiana, after white locals and federal soldiers put

down a rebellion of more than one hundred slaves under the leadership of Charles

Deslondes, a mulatto believed to be from Saint Domingue, one local writer described the

relief of having escaped from “a miniature representation of the horrors of St.

Domingo.”29 In the wake of Denmark Vesey’s failed attempt at revolt in Charleston,

South Carolina in 1822, Haiti or St. Domingo appeared almost twenty times in the trial

i n report, which officials published and distributed freely.

Nat Turner’s rebellion sparked more reaction from whites than any other revolt.

Even before Turner’s capture, Samuel Warner, an obscure northern journalist, published

Authentic and Impartial Narrative o f the Tragical Scene Which Was Witnessed in

Southampton County (Virginia) on Monday the 22d o f August Last. Although there is no

definitive link between Turner’s revolt and the Haitian Revolution, and Turner made no

mention of it in interviews conducted in the days leading up to his execution, Warner

insisted upon the connection. He began his account with a comment on white

southerners’ fears of slave revolt. T1 “In consequence of the alarming increase of the Black

population of the South, fears have been long entertained, that it might one day be the

unhappy lot of the whites, in that section, to witness scenes similar to those which but a

few years since, nearly depopulated the once flourishing island of St. Domingo of its

white inhabitants.” Warner claimed to have gathered information from face-to-face

conversations with Turner’s accomplices as well as other eyewitnesses. Historians have

28 Jordan,White Over Black, 395-96. 29 Junius Rodriguez, “Rebellion on the River Road: The Ideology and Influence of Lousiana’s German Coast Slave Insurrection of 1811,” in John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, eds.Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 249; Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, 43; Aptheker,American Negro Slave Revolts, 249. 30 Lofton, Denmark Vesey’s Revolt, 214, 271. 31 Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions o f Nat Turner: the Leaders o f the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. (Baltimore: Thomas Gray, 1831).

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been quick to dismiss these exchanges as mere fantasy, though none have offered any

evidence to refute their having taken place.32 It was through these interviews that Warner

learned of the role that the Haitian Revolution played in inciting Turner to rebel.

According to Warner, Turner spoke to his followers of “the happy effects which had

attended the united efforts of their brethren in St. Domingo, and elsewhere, and

encouraged them with the assurance that a similar effort on their part, could not fail to

produce a similar effect.” Like Haitian slaves, Turner “was for the total extermination of

the whites, without regard to age or sex!” He told his followers, “That by so doing, they

should soon be able (in imitation of the example set them by their brethren at St.

Domingo) to establish a government of their own.” Warner concluded with a brief

narrative of the revolution and a comment on the likelihood of its repetition in the United

States: “Such were the horrors that attended the insurrection of the Blacks in St.

Domingo; and similar scenes of bloodshed and murder might our brethren at the South

expect to witness, were the disaffected Slaves of that section of the country but once to

gain the ascendancy.” Post insurrection accounts such as this secured a place for the

32 Herbert Aptheker writes, “This pamphlet is almost wholly inaccurate but rumors are often quite as important as facts.” Henry Irving Tragle notes that Warner obtained a copyright for his pamphlet in New York nine days before Turner’s capture, and finds the work “quite obviously culled largely from newspaper accounts.. . No sources are identified. Presumably Warner worked primarily from news accounts, although he probably had reports sent north by letter.”Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion (New York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1966), 116; Tragle,The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation o f Source Material (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), 279-280. In spite of these warnings, we cannot dismiss Warner’s account outright. That Southampton slaves remembered the Haitian Revolution is not surprising. Joseph Carroll’s words, though they must be used cautiously, are helpful. “Refugees from that awful scene in San Domingo had settled in Southampton, having brought their Negroes with them. Nat, being a preacher, freely passing from one section of the country to another, probably had his dreams fired by hearing those Negroes recite those events which had happened in their former home.” Joseph Carroll,Slave Insurrections in the United States 1800-1865 (New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1969), 148. 33 Samuel Warner, Authentic and Impartial Narrative of the Tragical Scene Which Was Witnessed in Southampton County (Virginia) on Monday the 22d o f August Last. When Fifty-Five o f its Inhabitants (mostly women and children) were inhumanly MASSACRED BY THE BLACKS! Communicated by those who were eye witnesses of the bloody scene, and confirmed by the confessions of several of the Blacks while under Sentence of Death (New York: Warner & West, 1831), 6, 18, 30-31.

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Haitian Revolution in whites’ memory. As Lerone Bennett, Jr., has written, “No

monument was needed to remind nineteenth-century Americans of Haiti and Toussaint

L’Ouverture. Every hint, every rumor of slave disaffection called back the memory of the

little black man [Toussaint] who made a revolution and made it stick. And the names of

Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner turned memory into a nightmare.”34

Memories of the Haitian Revolution made many Americans tremble, yet for some

they were a source of both private inspiration and collective racial pride. African

Americans remembered the Caribbean slave revolt not as a nightmare but a dream worthy

of emulation. The history of African American slave resistance abounds with evidence of

slaves drawing inspiration from the heroes of the Haitian Revolution. Let us return to the

celebrated case of Denmark Yesey, as its implications for revolutionary transatlantic

black nationalism make the very existence of such a plot the subject of contention among

historians today. Much of Vesey’s early life is unknown. Likely bom on St. Thomas as a

slave and given the name Telemaque, he lived on Saint Domingue for a time and

i r probably returned to the colony years later as a sailor. We know more about Vesey’s

life as a free black man in Charleston. He read newspaper accounts of Haiti to local

blacks and invoked the revolution to inspire them to act. Vesey planned to sail to Haiti

after freeing Charleston’s slaves, and went so far as to contact the Haitian president to

alert him as to their expected arrival.36 It is clear that the rank and file of Vesey’s army

drew inspiration from the Haitian Revolution—an entire company hailed originally from

34 Lerone Bennett, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in American, 1619-1964 Revised Edition (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964), 111. 35 Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives o f Denmark Vesey (Madison, Wisconsin: Madison House, 1999), 136; Lofton,Denmark Vesey’s Revolt, 18-20; John Lofton,Denmark Vesey’s Revolt: The Slave Plot That Lit a Fuse to Fort Sumter (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983), 9. 36 Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, 135-137.

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Haiti.37 Vesey and his co-conspirators demonstrated a thorough knowledge of black

revolution, of both its potential costs and rewards. Such knowledge inspired solidarity

among various peoples, free and enslaved, native and foreign bom, African and

American. It furthermore undermined the institution of slavery as much as any failed

rebellion. Richard Wade a generation ago dismissed Vesey’s rebellion as a fantasy of

paranoid and delusional white slaveowners. Michael Johnson more recently denies the

plot’s existence on the grounds of a political conspiracy between Charleston’s Mayor and

the state’s Governor.38 Johnson’s meticulous reading of the transcripts of the Vesey trial

alongside the Official Report is notable. Based on sparse documentary evidence,

historians will continue to debate whether Vesey and countless other slaves intended to

kill for their freedom. There is no more debating, however, that, in the words of Ira

Berlin, “slaveholders never doubted there were more of their kind in the slave quarter.”

What is most significant for our discussion is not whether a genuine slave conspiracy

existed, for we will never know; it is instead the irrefutable proof that in the decades after

the Haitian Revolution, African Americans invoked it as they talked about revolution.

That is, they remembered the Haitian Revolution. One black resident of Charleston who

came of age in the wake of Vesey’s revolt later recalled of his youth, “Having heard of

Hayti and the Haytiens, I desired to become a soldier and go to Hayti.”40 David Walker,

the fiery Boston pamphleteer whose incendiary pamphlet The Appeal would later cause

whites to shudder throughout the South, likewise grew up immersed in this intellectual

37 Lofton, Denmark Vesey’s Revolt, 138. 38 Michael P. Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and his Co-Conspirators,”William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 4 (October 2001): 915-76; Richard C. Wade, “The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration,”Journal of Southern History 30, no. 2 (May 1964): 143-161. 39 Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 203. 40 Daniel Alexander Payne,Recollections o f Seventy Years (Nashville: A. M. E. Sunday School Union, 1888), 15-16.

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climate. This and other circumstantial evidence leads Peter Hinks to posit that Walker

knew Vesey and may have volunteered as one of his assistants.41

Nat Turner’s rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, though the most well known of

all antebellum slave insurrections, is less often cited as an example of the memory of the

Haitian Revolution among American slaves. There are, however, two possible links.

First, Turner originally scheduled his revolt for the Fourth of July, but illness forced a

change in plans.42 The rebellion occurred instead on August 22, exactly forty years to the

day from the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution.43 That Turner intentionally launched his

war against slavery on the anniversary of Haitian Revolution is likely, especially given

his original plan. Second, a letter sent to the governor of Virginia shortly after the revolt

from a man claiming to be a runaway slave from Virginia, offered detailed knowledge of

a black Haitian-American conspiracy to violently end slavery. The author, “Nero,”

claimed friendship with a Toussaint-like who after escaping from slavery in the United

States to Haiti joined a group of nascent revolutionaries who took “lessons from the

venerable survivors of the Haytian Revolution.” Describing the intentions of this “Chief’

and his fellow insurgents, Nero taunted the Governor: “They will know how to use the

knife, bludgeon, and the torch with effect—may the genius of Toussaint stimulate them

to unremitting exertion. It is not my intention to boast, nor to threaten beyond a certainty

of performing. We have no expectation of conquering the whites of the South States—our

41 Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Social Reform (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1997), 39. 42 Though Turner and his followers gathered on Sunday, August 21, they did not move until the early morning hours of the 22nd. Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 54. 43 Among those who have seen a link based on dates is Dillon, Slavery Attacked, 150; John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold,Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 16; Peter H. Wood, “Nat Turner: The Unknown Slave as Visionary Leader,” in Leon Litwack and August Meier, eds.,Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 27.

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object is to seek revenge for indignities and abuses received—and to sell our live[s] at as

high a price as possible.”44 The letter is revealing. While evidence suggests that Turner

only needed to swallow the bitter pill of slavery to convince him to sacrifice his life for

freedom, his allies understood his actions in the framework of the transatlantic struggle

for black freedom begun on Haiti four decades earlier.

Less celebrated examples of slave resistance also testify to the survival of Haiti’s

revolutionary ideology among African Americans. In 1818, a black crew aboard the

American brig Holkar murdered the ship’s captain, mate, and a passenger. Upon securing

control of the ship, the men “bore away for St. Domingue” and eventually reached their

destination. “Scuttling the brig in deep water, the men went ashore in the boat at Bennet

with a box of gold, and walked to Jacquemel.”45 In 1826, thirty-one Maryland slaves on

their way to the slave markets of New Orleans took a stand for liberty under the

leadership of a recalcitrant Baltimore slave, William Bowser. After throwing overboard

two members of the ship’s crew, including the captain, the insurrectionists demanded the

lone surviving sailor deliver them to Haiti.46

African American memory of the Haitian Revolution illuminates the existence of

a transatlantic racial identification with blacks throughout the Atlantic world.47 Historians

see its influence in slave revolts that took place in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Jamaica and

44 Ira Berlin, “After Nat Turner: A Letter From the North,”Journal of Negro History 55, no. 2 (April 1970): 144-51. 45 Bolster, Blackjacks, 146; Julius Sherrard Scott, III, “ ‘The Common Wind’: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution (Caribbean).” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986), 221,306. 46 Ralph Clayton,Cash for Blood: The Baltimore to New Orleans Domestic Slave Trade (Bowie, Maryland: Heritage Books, 1992), 71-74 ; Aptheker,American Negro Slave Revolts, 278. 47 For a discussion of the utility of the diasporic framework, see: Thomas Holt, “Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World: Reflections on the Diasporan Framework,” in Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 33-43; Chris Dixon,African America and Haiti-, Gilroy, Black Atlantic-, Michel Laguerre, Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998);

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elsewhere in one decade alone.48 In 1805, black rebels in Rio de Janeiro wore necklaces

of Toussaint’s successor, Dessalines.49 In Cuba in 1812, officials found the portrait of

Toussaint and other leading Haitian revolutionaries in a book, “a blueprint for

revolution,” which the notorious slave rebel Jose’ Antonia Aponte showed to free blacks

and slaves to enlist their support.50 Jamaican slaves sang songs about the Haitian

Revolution and celebrated Haitian independence.51 African Americans shared in this

subversive transatlantic counterculture.52 Jeffrey Bolster and Julius Scott point out that

African American sailors routinely encountered black Haitians on their travels, and at

times set foot on the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere. African

Americans also sang songs about Haiti, and some, like the Pittsburgh abolitionist George

B. Vashon, wrote poems to Haiti’s founding fathers. Others, like the radical abolitionist

Martin Delany, named their children after them. Most symbolic of blacks’ racial

identification with Haiti are the numbers of African Americans who emigrated there.

Elizabeth Rauh estimates that as many as twenty percent of all free blacks in the northern

48 Laurent Dubois, “The Promise of Revolution: Saint-Domingue and the Struggle for Autonomy in Guadeloupe, 1797-1802” Impactin of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 112-34; Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 47; Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 28. 49 Joao Jose Reis,Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising o f1835 in Bahia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 48. 50 Matt D. Childs, “A Black French General Arrived to Conquer the Island: Images of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba’s Aponte Rebellion” in Geggus,Impact of the Haitian Revolution, 136-37. 51 David Geggus, “The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes o f Slave Rebellions,” William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 2 (April 1987): 276; Preface,The Impact o f the Haitian Revolution on the Atlantic World, x; Dixon,African America and Haiti, 27. 52 While several studies cite African Americans’ celebration o f Haitian Independence, I agree with Mitch Kachun’s perspective on the possible misuse of sources. Though not denying blacks’ admiration of Haiti, public celebration of Haitian Independence would surely provoke white hostility and likely violence. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915 (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 272. 53 James T. Holly, A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government and Civilized Progress,” in Howard H. Bell, ed.,Black Separatism and the Caribbean 1860 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 39; Genovese,From Rebellion to Revolution, 96-97; for biographical information on Vashon, see: Paul N. Thomell, “The Absent Ones and the Providers: A Biography of the Vashons,” Journal of Negro History 83, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 284-301.

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United States emigrated to Haiti in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.54 Even

considering this, Christopher Dixon asserts, “historians have understated African

Americans’ relationship with the island republic of Haiti.”55 In spite of all of these forms

of remembering, it was the continual incidence of slave revolts and resistance that both

kept alive and sparked the periodical revival of American memory of the Haitian

Revolution.

Rarely do the scholarly literature on the Haitian Revolution, memory, and

nationalism intersect as neatly as in the contemporary accounts of nineteenth-century

slave revolts. White and black Americans remembered the Haitian Revolution, and these

memories clearly affected their perceptions. David Thelan suggests that individual

memories are not arbitrarily constructed. He writes, “The starting place for the

construction of an individual recollection is a present need or circumstance.”561 maintain

that the same is true of public memory, which is defined here as the collective imaginings

and impressions of the past that people share.57 It was the sectional contest over slavery,

and the violence associated with the war it resulted in, which ignited an explosion of

public memory of the Haitian Revolution. Public memory is an indispensable tool in

nation building. It is consequently at the center not only of American history, but also of

America itself.58 People often identify themselves as part of an imagined community, one

54 Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, The Roots of African-American Identity: Memory and History in Free Antebellum Communities (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 145. 55 Dixon,African America and Haiti, 2 56 David Thelen, Introduction to “Memory and American History,”Journal of American History 75 (1989): 1121. 57 The phenomenon of public memory is not new; historians have long understood that they do not have a monopoly on the past. Yet highly publicized cases of historical controversy, among them the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, the flying of the Confederate flag, DNA tests performed on Thomas Jefferson’s relatives, and discussions of slave reparations, have reinvigorated scholarship in this field. 58 Gregory T. Knouff,The Soldiers ’ Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Jill Lepore,

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with a common past that is revered and at times, as Benedict Anderson points out, worth

dying for.59 Of the burgeoning work of scholars on the relationship between memory and

the imagined American community, Alfred Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party:

Memory and the American Revolution informs this project particularly.60 Young’s story

of a simple Boston shoemaker who was present at the creation of the United States—who

fell out of and then back into the national consciousness—resonates with this project. The

political uses to which different constituencies put the memory of George Robert

Twelves Hewes as they struggled to make a new nation is useful for this study, which

examines the heated contest over the public memory of a lowly plantation slave and what

is today a forgotten slave insurrection.

Only recently have scholars begun to recognize the mid-nineteenth century as a

pivotal period in the development of American nationalism.61 Leading memory scholar

The Name o f War: King Philip’s War and the Origins o f American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Sarah J. Purcell,Sealed With Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Charles Royster,A Revolutionary People at War: the Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Len Travers,Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); David Waldstreicher,In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 59 For the idea of the “imagined community,” one that people are willing to die for, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Other important works on Nationalism include, Ernest Gellner,Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Liah Greeneld,Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Anthony D. Smith, ed.,Ethnicity and Nationalism (New York: Brill., 1992);National Identity (Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1991). 60 Alfred Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). 61 Benjamin L. Carp, “Nations of American Rebels: Understanding Nationalism in Revolutionary North America and the Civil War South,”Civil War History 48, Volume I (2002): 5-33; Avery O. Craven,The Growth of Southern Nationalism: 1848-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953); Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Drew Gilpin Faust,The Creation o f Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Susan-Mary Grant,North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2000); John McCardell,The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830-1860 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979); Peter J. Parish,The North and the Nation in the Era o f the Civil War, edited by Susan-Mary

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Michael Kammen offers the best explanation for why historians have traditionally

bypassed the Civil War-years when exploring the creation of American identity:

“Because we customarily connect the 1860s with sectionalism, there is a tendency to

forget how important the Civil War was as a stimulus to nationalism, both North and

South”62 The attention historians of nationalism are now giving to the Civil War-era is

both welcome and requisite, as our understanding of the ingredients that go into making

nationalism is incomplete. I agree with Christopher Looby’s assessment that, “Nations

are not bom, but made.”63 However, the process of nation building is never complete.

Citizens may put on a date on the birth of their nation; they may celebrate that day

annually as an ultimate act; however, they are continually remaking and refashioning

their imagined community. There are certain circumstances and events that encourage

reevaluation.64 Wars are particularly useful in this regard.65 Scholars of the early national

period, for example, have demonstrated how the War of 1812 fostered an intensification

of American nationalism that coincided with, among other things, a revival of public

memory of the revolutionary generation.66 This study recognizes the Civil War as having

Grandt and Adam I. P. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary,To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); David Potter, The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976); Emory M. Thomas,The Confederate Nation 1861-1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). 62 Kammen,Mystic Chords, 88. 63 Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins o f the United States (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1. 64 Eric Hobsbawm sees similarities in the invention of tradition, writing “There is probably no time and place with which historians are concerned which has not seen the ‘invention’ of tradition in this sense. However, we should expect it to occur more frequently when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patters for which ‘old’ traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which they were not applicable, or when such old traditions and their institutional carriers and promulgators no longer prove sufficiently adaptable and flexible, or are otherwise eliminated: in short, when there are sufficiently large and rapid changes on the demand of the supply side.” “Inventing Tradition,” in Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention o f Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 4-5. 65 Of war and American memory, Michael Kammen writes, wars have served “a fundamental role in stimulating, defining, justifying, periodizing, and eventually filtering American memories and traditions.” Mystic Chords of Memory, 3. 66 Young,Shoemaker and the Tea Party, Knouff, Soldiers ’ Revolution', Purcell, Sealed With Blood.

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presented the American people with a crisis in national identity. During this bloody

conflict to end slavery, northerners and southerners deployed the Haitian Revolution in

sermons and orations, political speeches and pamphlets, biographical sketches and

historical narratives to gain allies, steel resolve, effect policy, and win the war. Because

of this mobilization of the past, the Haitian Revolution provided central images around

which they attempted to define both their cause and their nation.

This development had its roots earlier in the nineteenth century, when the

growing rift over slavery sent northerners and southerners in search of answers. As

contemporaries failed to offer any remedies, many turned to history. In doing so, they

looked to earlier generations that, like themselves, struggled with problems of race and

slavery. The genre of history fascinated Americans, who in the first half of the nineteenth

century consumed historical and biographical narratives of the United States, as well as

of the ancient world, Europe, the East and West Indies, and elsewhere. We know that in

their quest to locate a “usable past,” Americans talked and read about Christopher

Columbus and Europe’s conquest of the Americas, George Washington and the American

67 William Gilmore,Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 127, 324-29, 333-36, 339-40. The literature on the expansion of literacy and the rise of the book trade as a result o f technology is expansive: Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography & Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill & London, 1999), 79; William Charvat,Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959),Chapter One; David D. Hall, “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600-1850” in William L. Joyce, David D. Hall, Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench, eds.,Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), 1-47; Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt,The Book in America: A History o f the Making and Selling of Books in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1951); James Gilreath, “American Book Distribution,”Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 95, no. 2 (October 1985): 501-83; John Williams Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, The Creation of an Industry 1630-1865, vol. 1 (New York & London: R. R. Bowker, 1972); Ronald J. Zboray,A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the Reading Public for American Novels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte and the wars between England and France.68 Historians

have often overlooked the fact that they also talked and read about the Haitian

Revolution.69 Words like “Toussaint” and “St. Domingo” were part of the American

vernacular, while other words still common today, like “horror,” took on distinctive

meanings, conjuring up images of wanton violence and racial Armageddon.

Kammen dismisses the importance of the genre of history before the 1870s. He

maintains that before the Civil War Americans’ commonly alluded to the “burden of the

past” rather than to its possible uses.70 However, Civil War-era popular culture resounds

with spoken and written interpretations of past people and events. Abraham Lincoln

articulated the belief of a generation of Americans when he said in his Annual Address to

Congress in December 1862, “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.”71 This study

highlights the practice of appropriating history to effect political change and construct

group identity by illuminating the extent to which Americans in the nineteenth century

came to understand and participate in their own revolution over slavery by imagining one

that already occurred. Decades ago, a pair of historians referred to the Civil War as

America’s Second Revolution, but to better understand the larger context in which the

conflict took place, we are perhaps better served identifying it as a Second Haitian

68 Henry Steele Commager,The Search for a Usable Past, and Other Essays in Historiography (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1967); Scott E. Casper,Constructing American Lives: Biography & Culture in Nineteenth- Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Marshall Foletta,Coming to Terms with Democracy: Federalist Intellectuals and the Shaping of an American Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 182-208; David Kaser,Books and Libraries in Camp and Battle: The Civil War Experience (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1984); Warren I. Susman, “History and the American Intellectual,” inCulture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 15. 69 Alfred N. Hunt,Haiti’s Influence of Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1980), Chapters Three and Four. 70 Kammen, Mystic Chords, 35. 71 Roy P. Basler,The Collected Works o f Abraham Lincoln, vol 5 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 537.

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Revolution.72 For many during the Civil War, memory of the Haitian Revolution became

ascendant, as the American Revolution was ill suited to two groups engaged in an

internecine sectional conflict. Buoyant memories of the American Revolution were a relic

of a bygone era when northerners and southerners worshipped at the same nationalistic

shrine. This is not to say Americans forgot the American Revolution. They did not. In

fact, the Civil War sparked an oral and print culture of remembering in which the

American Revolution had a central place. However, radicals in both sections invested a

great deal in the Haitian Revolution, for while the revolution that made the United States

left slavery untouched, the one that made Haiti destroyed the institution permanently. In

remembering a revolution over slavery, one in which black men used violence against

white men to become free, northerners and southerners created conversations on the

possibilities of either a multiracial society or race war. The Civil War forced people to

imagine themselves as members of a new national polity, one in which emancipated

slaves and uniformed black soldiers either shared in the rights of ordinary citizens, or

reenacted any number of unspeakable acts like those committed on Haiti.

The explosion of popular interest in the Haitian Revolution during the Civil War

suggests the primacy of black history and culture in the making of America. The radical

abolitionist and Massachusetts State Senator Charles Sumner said in the second year of

the Civil War, “Wherever I turn in this war I find the African.”73 What was obvious to

Sumner is less so more than a century and a half later. In spite of more than a century of

72 Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard,The Rise o f American Civilization, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 2: Chapter Eighteen; For a historiographical account of the history of the concept, see: Roger L. Ransom, “Fact and Counterfact: The ‘Second American Revolution’ Revisited,”Civil War History 45, no. 1 (1999): 28-60. 73 Charles Sumner, Emancipation! Its Policy and Necessity as a War Measure for the Suppression of the Rebellion (Boston: 1862), 11.

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reliable scholarship on African American history, and the work of such pioneer historians

as Melville Herskovits and John Blassingame on the impact of African people and culture

on America, Americans still tend to treat the role of Africa and African Americans in the

American experience with amnesia.74 African Americans were not a people without a

past. This dissertation underscores the fact that their history meant as much to the

construction of Americanness as it did to the manufacturing of African American

identity. Historians note the conservative uses to which Americans traditionally put

public memory. “More often than not,” writes Kammen, memory serves “as a bulwark

n c t for social and political stability—a means of valorizing resistance to change.” This

study by contrast, illuminates the subversive potential inherent in remembering the

Haitian Revolution specifically and black history generally.76 It moreover underscores the

instability and plasticity inherent in all public remembering, for memory, as it is

constructed, is unpredictable. Like a pebble dropped in a tranquil pond, there is no

predicting its ripple effects.77

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, in their recent survey of the Atlantic world,

describe a series of revolutionary and subversive “connections” that historians have, over

74 Kammen writes of African Americans in national memory, “the dominant culture inclined to amnesia on the subject.” Mystic Chords of Memory, 87; Blassingame,Slave Community, Melville J. Herskovits,The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958); Some of the earliest historians of African American history include, W. E. B. Dubois, George Washington Williams, and Carter G. Woodson. 75 Kammen, Mystic Chords, 59. 76 Paul Gilroy’s discussion regarding the “antinomies of modernity” is informing.The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 77 Patrick Rael’s work on black nationalism in the North misses the subversiveness of African American memory. “In the very act of using cherished American values to resist oppression and discrimination, they unwittingly endorsed core premises so deeply ingrained in them-the natural primacy of men over women, the virtues of bourgeois culture, and the sanctity of Western “civilization”—that alternatives were literally unthinkable.”Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 10.

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time, “denied, ignored, or simply not seen.”78 To fully comprehend the impact of the

violent end of slavery on Haiti, we must consider its impact temporally in addition to

spatially, by looking at the Civil War. The long and dark shadow of the Haitian

Revolution extended not only over latitudes and longitudes, but also across time. By

picking up the story of Haiti’s influence on antebellum America where previous writers

left off, and extending the paradigm of the Atlantic World to the 1860s, this dissertation

gives the Civil War a much-needed multicultural and trans-national reading. There is a

tendency to read the Civil War as a catalyst.79 But in this study, the war is read instead as

the concluding chapter of a revolutionary struggle begun on Haiti in the eighteenth

century. African Americans and their radical white allies insisted that the Civil War was a

Second Haitian Revolution. Confederates and white northerners who shared their

racialized attitudes feared this was the case.

This dissertation takes a thematic approach within a loosely chronological

framework. Its cues derive from the methodological practices employed in both the new

cultural history and especially the study of public memory. Primary research centers on

biographies of Toussaint and general histories of the Haitian Revolution published on the

eve of and during the Civil War. Analysis of these materials reveals the primacy of

narrative in the construction of both public memory and national identity. Hayden White

contends the significance of narrative lies in its capacity to make sense of the present by

78 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker,The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 7. 79 Among those who see the Civil War in this light are: Charles and Mary Beard,Rise of American Civilization, vol 2, 53-54; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 450-53; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), Chapter One.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. imposing order and values on the past.80 It is for this reason that during the war,

Americans displayed an unquenchable thirst for the story of the Haitian Revolution.

Popular newspapers and periodicals are likewise a critical primary source, as they allow

access to both the shared imaginings of Americans at one of the most crucial moments in

their history, and the arenas for public discourse on issues that are central to this study’s

context. Because of this project’s theoretical emphasis on race and slavery, antislavery

and abolitionist papers are especially important. These sources are read alongside

numerous other popular printed discourses, including novels, short stories, and travel

narratives, which writers published in the years leading up to or during the Civil War and

invoked Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution. In evaluating the production and meanings

of these narratives and the ways in which writers strategically deployed them, this

dissertation demonstrates the often porous and permeable nature of the line dividing

cultural history from literary analysis. We hear the voices of ordinary men and women

who shaped public memory during the Civil War in published letters, opinion pieces, and

interviews. I use manuscripts, diaries, and other unpublished accounts only sparingly, to

reinforce an idea or ideas set forth in published matter.

This study, like other recent work on historical memory, considers the role of

private memories in the making of public memory.81 Historians have failed to recognize

the effect personal memories of the Haitian Revolution had on Americans in the middle

of the nineteenth century. Numbers of politicians, soldiers, and slaves carried oral

80 Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in W. J. T. Mitchell,On ed., Narrative (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981): 1-24. 81 Young, Shoemaker and the Tea Party, Part One; Sarah J. Purcell writes, “Public memory and private memory were often closely intertwined in the foundational period of America history.”Sealed With Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 4.

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traditions of the Haitian Revolution with them into the war. Indeed, at the middle of the

nineteenth century the Haitian Revolution was a more current event than historians have

realized. One high-ranking General in the United States Army and a veteran of the

Mexican and American war explained in a public address: “This insurrection having

occurred so near to us, and being within the recollection of many persons living, who

heard the exaggerated accounts of the day, has fastened itself on the public imagination,

until it has become a subject of frequent reference.” The speaker recognized the

polarizing effect of these oral traditions. “Southern twaddlers declaim about the Southern

States being reduced to the condition of St. Domingo, and abolitionists triumphantly

point to it as a case where the negro race have asserted and maintained their freedom.”

By seeking out oral forms of remembering when possible, this dissertation separates itself

from the traditional methodology employed by historians to explicate the sources of

public memory. The study of history is rooted in writing. Printed items in libraries,

archives, and other repositories enable historians to interpret the past. Yet, in certain

cases, other methods of inquiry are needed to illuminate what people thought. An obvious

example is the centrality of oral forms of communication among nineteenth-century

African Americans. Statistics show that as many as ninety percent were illiterate.83 It is

for this reason that this study evaluates both spoken and printed words as essential

vehicles of collective memory.84

82 Felix Huston,Address of Gen. Felix Huston, to the Members o f the Southern Convention, to be Held at Nashville, on the Third June, 1850 (Natchez, Mississippi: Free Trade Office, 1850), 12. 83 Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, 83; James O. Horton and Lois E. Horton,Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 130; 84 Studies emphasizing orality in American and African American culture include: Detine Lee Bowers, “A Strange Speech of an Estranged People: Theory and Practice of Antebellum African-American Freedom Day Orations.” Ph.D. diss., Purdue University, 1992; Sandra M. Gustafson,Eloquence is Power: Oratory & Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); “Performing the

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The Introduction is followed by core chapters that are grouped into three parts.

Each part examines the ways various constituencies deployed and at times exploited the

memory of the Haitian Revolution in three of the dominant public debates of the Civil

War. Part One focuses on the discussions in northern oral and print culture over the

legitimacy of violence in the pursuit of abolition, and the simultaneous southern debates

on secession. John Brown’s failed raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, emerges as a central

theme in both discussions. Northern black abolitionists and their white allies constructed

a uniquely radical and Americanized Heroic Model of the Haitian Revolution in calling

for a violent end to slavery. In response, white southerners argued and eventually won

support for secession by deploying the Apocalyptical Model of the revolution, the same

narrative that had dominated proslavery thought for decades. Part Two looks at the debate

over black soldiery, an issue that more than any other generated an antagonistic and

contentious war of words both across and within sections. Included is a discussion of the

ways abolitionist orators and writers deployed the memory of Toussaint to convince both

the president and the federal government of the policy of arming of black men. Included

is a look at the special meaning the memory of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution

carried for both free and enslaved blacks. Part Three centers on the issue of

Emancipation. Paying special attention to the explosion of iconographic representations

of the Haitian Revolution that appeared in northern and southern print culture during the

war, these chapters underscore the extent to which Americans contested the memory of

the Haitian Revolution in their construction of oppositional and racialized national

identities.

Word: American Oratory, 1630-1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1993), 467-468; Looby, Voicing America.

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RACE, SECTION, AND REBELLION: OPENING

THE CIVIL WAR OF WORDS

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“THE INEFFACEABLE CHARACTERS OF BLOOD”: ABOLITIONISTS

AND THE SEMIOTICS OF BLACK REVOLUTION

“Memory begins when something in the present stimulates an association,” writes

memory historian David Thelan. In the 1850s, both the national trauma of sectional

violence and the threat of war over slavery that stimulated Americans to remember the

Haitian Revolution.1 Radical abolitionists were at the forefront of this revival of historical

memory, for in the decade before the Civil War their dreams of a peaceful solution to the

problem of slavery ended. The United States Congress’ passage of the Fugitive Slave

Law in 1850 and the Kansas and Nebraska Act in 1854, along with the Supreme Court’s

Dred Scott decision in 1859, convinced them of the futility of both the political process

and moral suasion to eradicate slavery. Violence in places like Christiana, Pennsylvania,

Lawrence, Kansas, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia, proved that the days of nonviolent

resistance to slavery had passed. Memory of the Haitian Revolution proved the utility of

violence in ending slavery. Only on Haiti, had an entire population of slaves launched a

bloody revolution to end slavery and emerged from the smoke and ashes of war free men.

Through an examination of oral and print culture, this chapter illuminates how African

1 David Thelan, “Memory and American History,”Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (March 1989):

1120. 31

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Americans and their radical white allies used the Haitian Revolution in calling for both a

violent end to slavery and the remaking of America.2

Biographical accounts of Toussaint written and published by British abolitionists

figured prominently in the American memory of the Haitian Revolution at the middle of

the nineteenth century. Despite varieties in length and format of these, the narratives of

Henry Gardiner Adams, Wilson Armistead, John Relly Beard, and Harriet Martineau all

constructed Toussaint as a Great Man, an exceptional and unmatched national hero who

served as the embodiment of the Haitian Revolution. Beard ranked Toussaint among

history’s greatest men in his lengthy two-volume biography: “If the world has reason to

thank God for great men, with special gratitude should we acknowledge the divine

goodness in raising up Toussiant L’Ouverture. Among the privileged races of the earth,

the roll of patriots, legislators, and heroes, is long and well filled. As yet there is but one

Toussaint L’Ouverture.”3 Martineau wrote in a biographical sketch that appeared in the

popular Penny Magazine, which was published simultaneously in England and New

York, “He was a Great Man: and what one man of his race has been, others may be.”4

Armisted perhaps had a copy of Martineau’s piece by his side when writing in his

biographical sketch of Toussaint, he “was, emphatically, a Great Man; and what he was,

2 Reliable accounts of the decade before the Civil War include: James McPherson,Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988);Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 3d ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2001); David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848- 1861 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976); Charles P. Roland,An American Illiad: The Story o f the Civil War, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2002). 3 John R. Beard, The Life o f Toussaint L 'Ouverture: The Negro Patriot o f Hayti: Comprising an Account o f the Struggle for Liberty in the Island, and a Sketch of Its History to the Present Period (London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853), 279. 4 [Harriet Martineau], “Account of Toussaint Louverture,”Monthly Supplement of The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion o f Useful Knowledge 385, no. 7 (Febmary 28 to March 31, 1838): 128. William Jackson published Charles Knight’sPenny Magazine in New York. The magazine was England’s most widely read periodical, known especially for its illustrations. Scott Bennett, “The Editorial Character and Readership of The Penny Magazine: An Analysis,”Victorian Periodical Review 17 (1984): 127-28.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. others of his race may equally attain to.”5 Hopeful of undermining the white supremacist

ideology upon which slavery rested, these writers offered Toussaint as proof of the

capacity of the black race. Adams stated his objective for writing a sketch of Toussaint.

“It seems desirable to place before the public, in a cheap and easily accessible form, some

of the most striking facts that could be collected, in refutation of the opinion, entertained,

or at least urged, by some, that the Negro is essentially, and unalterably, an inferior

being.”6 Martineau described her reasons thusly, “while society is waiting for evidence of

what the negro race at large can do and become, it seems to be rational to build high

hopes upon such a character.” Toussaint was a man “who will ever be regarded in history

as one of the most remarkable men of an age teeming with social wonders.” 7 Beard

claimed that his biography offered “the clearest evidence that there is no insuperable

barrier between the light and the dark-coloured tribes of our common human species.”

Armistead intended his anthology, which included a lengthy biographical sketch of

Toussaint, to prove “that the white and dark coloured races of man are alike the children

of one heavenly father, and in all respects equally endowed by him.”9

To demonstrate Toussaint’s exceptionalism, each of these writers emphasized his

character, often at the expense of his military accomplishments. They applauded his

refusal to join the Saint Domingue slave revolt in its early stages, his willingness to

protect his white master, and his leniency towards vanquished foes. They recited his

5 Wilson Armistead, A Tribute for the Negro: Being a Vindication of the Moral, Intellectual, and Religious Capabilities of the Coloured Portion of Mankind. Illustrated by Numerous Biographical Sketches, Facts, Anecdotes, etc. and Many Superior Portraits and Engravings (Manchester: William Irwin; New York: William Hamed, 1848), 299. 6 Henry Gardiner Adams,God’s Image in Ebony: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches, Facts, Anecdotes, etc. Demonstrative of the Mental Powers and Intellectual Capacities of the Negro Race (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1854), i. 7 [Martineau], “Account of Toussaint L’Ouverture,” 122. 8 Beard, Life o f Toussaint L ’Ouverture, vol. 1,1. 9 Armistead, Tribute fo r the Negro, b.

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religiosity, his love of animals, and his monogamy. They repeated the oft-cited quotation

that Toussaint, “never broke his word.”10 Toussaint’s domestic life was of special

concern, and these writers wrapped Toussaint in gendered clothing when rooting him

firmly in the domestic sphere.11 Adams wrote, “it is neither as the warrior nor to the

legislator, great as he undoubtedly was in both these capacities, that we look upon

Toussaint L’Ouverture with the greatest admiration. Rather do we prefer to view him in

his social and domestic relations as the attached and devoted servant, the tender and

affectionate husband and father, the faithful friend.” 1 0 Martineau wrote in her popular

“historical romance,” Toussaint “was rather romantic, and did not like jesting on

domestic affairs. He was more prudisih about such matters than whites fresh from the

mother-country.”13 Martinueau described a domestic scene that Beard depicted in one of

the six illustrations included in his book [See Figure 2.1]. In the image, Toussaint sits

comfortably with his legs crossed in a square and sturdily constructed kitchen. His hat

and jacket hang on a distant wall, while on his lap rests open a large, thick book, which

has his attention. A feather and quill are ready for his use. Toussaint is a bibliophile and a

author. Two small children, presumably his children, play close to his feet on the floor;

10 Armistead, Tribute for the Negro, 286. 11 Bmce Dorsey writes of the sentimentalization of slaves in antebellum reform culture, “By sentimentalizing slaves, anti-slavery writers depicted all enslaved people with characteristics that were clearly understood in that culture to be feminine.”Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002): 187. 12 Adams, God’s Image in Ebony, 15. 13 Martineau, The Hour and the Man: An Historical Romance in Two Volumes (New York: Harper Brothers, 1841), 26. For the popularity of the book in England and the United States, see Susan Belasco, “Harriet Martineau’s Black Hero and the American Antislavery Movement,”Nineteenth Century Literature 55, No. 2 (2000): 157-194. The American press paid more attention to this account of Toussaint than any other. Reviews appeared in numerous papers: “The Hour and the Man. An Historical Romance,”Christian Examiner and General Review 32 (May 1842): 190-204; “Literary Intelligence,”The New Yorker, 10 (1840-41), 286; “Review ofThe Hour and the Man: A Historical Romance, by Harriety Martineau,”The Athenaeum 5 December 1840, 958; Sarah J. Hale, “Review Theof Hour and the Man, by Harriet Martineau,”Godey’s Lady’s Book 22 (1841): 144; Margaret Fuller, “Review of The Hour and the Man, by Harriet Martineau,”The Dial 2 (1841): 134-35; Orestes Brownson, “Review of The Hour and the Man, by Harriet Martineau,”The Boston Quarterly Review A(1841): 260.

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their ball rests a short distance away. Toussaint’s turbaned wife prepares a meal in her

bare hands with her sleeves rolled to the elbow. Two rows of beads circle her neckline. It

is a scene of middle-class tranquility and domestic bliss, of a satisfied and undisturbed

middle-aged man, enjoying the company of his family. It is hardly the standard depiction

of a violent rebel slave.

T O U SSA IN T RISAUI.NO TJIJi AIIJ1K KAYNAli’s W O RK .

Figure 2.1: John Relly Beard, Life o f Toussaint L ’Ouverture, the Negro Patriot of Hayti, 1854

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The image evokes the “romantic racialist” slave ideal described by George

Fredrickson, which permeated the antebellum abolitionist imagination. According to

Fredrickson, reformers insisted on the vulnerability of slaves. They contended that

African Americans were an inherently emotional and sentimental people. These traits

rendered them powerless and passive victims who were both incapable and unwilling to

seek freedom through violent means.14 When at mid-century British abolitionists centered

Toussaint in the history of the Haitian Revolution, they borrowed a common device

employed by other abolitionists in England, France, Haiti, and the United States who

chronicled the Haitian Revolution throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.

They crafted him as a nonthreatening and nonviolent rebel slave. Targeting and

eventually reaching a largely white, educated, middle-class audience, they used him as a

synecdoche of the Haitian Revolution, a hammer to chip away at the ideological pedestal

of racism upon which the bust of slavery rested. More than a half-century after the violent

end of slavery on Haiti, these European reformers remained committed to the tactic of

moral suasion. They placed great faith in the belief that they could convince slaveowners

throughout the Atlantic world of both the evils of slavery and the potential of the black

race. They clung to the dream that slavery would end wherever it existed, in time.

On American soil, abolitionists had run out of patience. In remembering the

Haitian Revolution, they demonstrated that their British counterparts were out-of-step

with their movement and the political philosophy of their leaders. In the 1850s, radical

abolitionists performed lectures on the Haitian Revolution that set forth an exceedingly

14 George Frederickson, Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 97-129; Ronald G. Walters,The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (New York, 1978), 54-69.

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radical and uniquely American take on Haitian history.15 Moving beyond the standard

model of Toussaint as the Great Man of Haiti, these men of varying races and

backgrounds emboldened him as a Slave Soldier, a militant black man who employed

violence in the pursuit of freedom. While abolitionists normally hesitated to invoke the

Haitian Revolution, due to the images it evoked of racial violence and the failure of black

government, now they eagerly deployed its memory and insisted upon its significance for

the entire nation.16

The narratives of William Wells Brown, Charles Wyllys Elliott, James Theodore

Holly, and John Mercer Langston differed from those of the British abolitionists, in a

number of respects. First, they were orated. In 1854, Brown, a self-educated fugitive

slave from Kansas delivered “St. Domingo: Its Revolution and its Heroes” in London and

Philadelphia. A year later, Elliott, a local author, reformer, and philanthropist in New

York City performed “Heroes are Historic Men. St. Domingo, it’s Revolution and its

Hero, Toussaint Louverture” before the New York Library Society, whose members

15 William Wells Brown, St. Domingo: its Revolutions and its Patriots. A Lecture, Delivered Before the Metropolitan Athenceum, London, May 16, and at St. Thomas ’ Church, Philadelphia, December 20, 1854 (Boston: Bela marsh, 1855); James Theodore Holly, “A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government, and Civilized Progress, as Demonstrated by Historical Events of the Haytian Revolution; and the Subsequent Acts of That People Since Their National Independence,” in Howard H. Bell, ed.,Black Separatism and the Caribbean 1860 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970); John Mercer Langston, “The World’s Anti-Slavery Movement, its Heroes and its Triumphs: a Lecture Delivered at Xenia, O., Aug. 2, and Cleveland, O., Aug. 3, 1858” in Freedom and Citizenship. Selected Lectures and Addresses of Hon. John Mercer Langston, LL.D., U.S. Minister Resident at Haiti. With an Introductory Sketch By Rev. J.E. Rankin, D.D., o f Washington (Miami, Florida: Mnemosyne Publishing Inc., 1969); Charles Wyllys Elliott,Heroes are Historic Men. St. Domingo, it’s Revolution and its Hero, Toussaint Louverture: An Historical Discourse Condensed for the New York Library Association. February 26, 1855. (New York: J. A. Dix, 1855). 16 For brief discussions of the reasons why African Americans at times refrained from publicly celebrating the Haitian Revolution, see Bruce Dain, “Haiti and Egypt in Early Black Radical Discourse in the United States,”Slavery and Abolition 14, no. 3 (December 1993): 139-61; Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 57, 272. David Geggus provides an analysis of British abolitionists’ treatment of Haiti: “Haiti and the Abolitionists: Opinion, Propaganda and International Politics in Britain and France, 1804-1838,” in David Richardson, ed.,Abolition and its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790-1916 (London: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1985): 113-140.

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included the prominent black abolitionists J. W. C. Pennington and James McCune

Smith.17 Also in 1855, Holly, a free black shoemaker, journalist, and church deacon from

Washington, D.C., presented “A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-

Government, and Civilized Progress, as Demonstrated by Historical Events of the

Haytian Revolution” to a black literary society in New Haven, Connecticut. He later

repeated the address in Ohio, Michigan, and Canada West. John Mercer Langston, an

Oberlin educated lawyer of African, European, and Native American descent, gave an

account of the Haitian Revolution in “The World’s Anti-Slavery Movement; Its Heroes

and its Triumphs,” which he performed in Xenia and Cleveland, Ohio • in •181858.

While others had lectured on the Haitian Revolution throughout the first half of

the nineteenth century, these performances subverted the standard role of the nineteenth-

century orator.19 By taking the Haitian Revolution out of the print media of books,

newspapers, and periodicals and injecting it into the streets and open-aired halls of the

United States, Canada, and even London, these speakers fostered both the popularization

of memory of the Haitian Revolution and the radicalization of the abolitionist movement.

The mnemonic device of oratory encouraged an immediate, collective response from

17 Elliott would go on to serve as commissioner on New York’s Central Park. “Charles Wyllys Elliot,” Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, ed. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, vol. 6 (New York: Appleton, 1888), 329. 18 For information on Langston, see his autobiography,From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1894; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint co., 1969). 19 Both black and white abolitionists had lectured on the Haitian Revolution before. Orville Luther Holley, John Jay, James McCune Smith, and John Brown Russworm are among those who lectured on the Haitian Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century. “Extract of an Oration, Delivered on the 4th of July, 1822, by O. L. Holly Esq.,”The Genius of Universal Emancipation, 2 (December 1822): 93; “Public Lectures of the New York Phoenixonian Literary Society,”The Colored American, 6 February 1841; “Lecture on the Haytien Revolutions,”Colored American, 5 June 1841; Philip S. Foner, “John Brown Russworm, a Document,”Journal of Negro History 54, no. 4 (October 1969): 393-95. On the conservative nature of American oratory and the potential for subversion, see: Sandra Marie Gustafson,Oratory & Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); “Performing the Word: American Oratory, 1630-1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1993); Cristopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins o f the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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audience members, who committed what amounts to a public display of abolitionist

affection when they attended these lectures, for these orators sanctioned the violent

methods that Haitian slaves used against whites to become free. That each lecture

appeared later in print form aided in this process, by making the lectures accessible to

countless others. Elliott’s lecture provides an example. The irony of a white man

celebrating Toussaint in a public arena in front of a predominately black audience was

not lost on local media. Even before the lecture, a writer in the New York Times confessed

the daunting prospect of sitting amidst a black crowd listening to a lecture on such a

highly controversial subject. To diffuse any possible embarrassment, the writer used wit:

“We will venture to add that all will be welcome, though perhaps there will not be

placarded over the entrance, ‘White people allowed in this room.’”20 After the lecture, the

paper reported that the lecture was “listened to with great interest. The audience

applauded during his performance, and after its conclusion, tendered the speaker ‘a

unanimous vote of thanks.’”21 Following the recital, various groups requested that Elliott

repeat the lecture elsewhere, and the Times vouched for its value. “The great interest that

attaches to the subject, the pleasing and attractive manner in which it is presented, and the

agreeable address of the lecturer, will entitle him to large audiences, which we hope he

may meet.”22 We do not know if any of the later performances ever took place. We do

know, however, that the life of Elliott’s lecture had only just begun. The New York

Library Association published the speech as a pamphlet just one month after the original

performance. That numerous media reviewed the text indicates that the lecture brought

both Elliott and his subject a degree of celebrity. The national periodicalPutnams ’

20 “White People Allowed,”New York Times, 26 February 1855. 21 “Toussaint L’Ouverture— Lecture by C.W. Elliott,New York Times, 27 February 1855. 22 “Toussaint L’Ouverture,”New York Times, 28 February 1855.

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Monthly dismissed the literary qualities of the piece, yet recommended it to its readers for

the “spirited and deeply interesting account of the career of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the

liberator of St. Domingo.” 23 The Times suggested in a lengthy review that the lecture was

most valuable for “its fearful historic lesson.” The paper described the similarities

between the causes of the Haitian Revolution and the reasons for America’s sectional

crisis. The paper warned white southerners especially. “There is in these events of St.

Domingo a deep lesson to the South.” Slaves’ contentment, their songs and their dances,

were a chimera. The American slaves’ thirst for liberty “does not show itself now; it did

not for long in St. Domingo. But it is there.” The South sat atop a volcano. “It is possible

that when the fatal time comes, not even a rumble or a quaking may warn us before.” The

lesson of Elliott’s lecture was that for white southerners, “Your TOUSSAINT may be

now meekly enduring his bondage.” Slavery would end in America just as it did in Haiti.

The truth was “that you cannot safely hold a man a slave.”24 Media coverage of the

printed lecture is revealing when we consider the reaction of local media more than a

decade earlier when the noted abolitionist John Jay also delivered an oration on Toussaint

in New York City. While the African American Colored American alerted readers to the

event, the city’s major papers were silent.25 Now, however, on the eve of the Civil War,

even white papers took notice.

Another similarity of these four lectures is both the advocacy of violence as a

method of slave resistance and the equation of violence with masculinity. Whereas

British abolitionists accentuated Toussaint’s domestic and familial relations as evidence

23 “St. Domingo, its Revolution and its Hero,”Putnam’s Monthly Magazine o f American Literature, Science, and Art 5, no. 29 (May 1855): 552. 24 “The Danger to the South”New York Times, 9 May 1855. 25 Public Lectures of the New York Phoenixonian Literary Society.”

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of his greatness, American radicals emphasized his military accomplishments. In doing

so, they squared the gendered construction of Toussaint with the evolving notion of

manhood in the middle of the nineteenth century.26 Langston said that as a husband and

father, Toussaint “was altogether without fault, always exhibiting towards his wife the

tenderest love, and towards his children the most affectionate and fatherly solicitude.” As

a friend, Toussaint was both generous and magnanimous. But, Langston insisted, “the

character of this extraordinary man shines most brilliantly and beautifully in his conduct

as a great military leader and hero.” The Ohio abolitionist admitted that the Haitian

Revolution was “full of blood, carnage, and death.” He nonetheless justified “the struggle

of a people who, driven to desperation by inhuman and intolerable oppression, made one

last, mighty effort to throw off their yoke and gain their manhood.”27 Brown, Elliott, and

Holly avoided comment on Toussaint’s domestic life. Brown summarized Toussaint’s

accomplishments thusly. “From a slave he rose to be a soldier, a general, and a governor,

and might have been a king.” Elliott asserted that under Toussaint’s leadership, Haitians

were invincible. “The electric spark which fired his soul fired theirs.” He then opined on

26 According to Anthony Rotundo, in the latter half of the nineteenth century the white middle-class notion of manhood changed from a communal, collective ideal to a more individualistic one that emphasized man’s struggle to contain innate animalistic impulses. This radical reconceptualization owed much to the Civil War, as the savage and brutal event suggested that “courage, strength, endurance, duty, [and] principled sacrifice” were desired values in a rapidly changing world.American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era(New York: Basic Books, 1993), 234. Bertram Wyatt-Brown has described at length the evolution of white southern notions of masculinity in conjunction with ideas of the violent defense of honor. The Shaping o f Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001);Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York and Oxford: 1986); For a discussion of nineteenth-century reform in the context of larger discussions on gender and violence, see: John Demos, “The Antislavery Movement and the Problem of Violent Means,”New England Quarterly 37 (December 1864): 501-26; Dorsey,Reforming Men and Women-, Daniel C. Littlefield, “Blacks, John Brown, and a Theory of Manhood,” in Paul Finkelman, ed., His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid(Charlotte and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995): 67-97; William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease,Confrontation and Abolition in the 1850s, Journal of American History 58, no. 4 (March 1972): 923-37. 27 Langston, “World’s Anti-Slavery Movement,” 56. A clear indication of Langston’s militancy was the naming of his son, Arthur Dessalines Langston. Langston From the Virginia Plantation, 157. 28 Brown, St. Domingo, 36.

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the legitimacy of slaves’ use of violence to both win freedom and vindicate their

manhood. “Great is he who spends his blood and his life, fighting for liberty—but base is

the man who kills and destroys for fame or plunder.” On Haiti, black slaves defeated

France’s best soldiers and “proved themselves men.”29 Holly likewise commented on the

efficacy of violence in both securing liberty and proving the manhood of the race. He

insisted “That freedom and independence are written in the world’s history in the

ineffaceable characters of blood; and its crimsoned letters will ever testify of the

determination and of the ability of the negro to be free, throughout the everlasting

succession of ages.” Holly castigated those who qualified the outcome of the Haitian

Revolution, due to the racial bloodletting that occurred, and instead used violence as a

trophy of black manhood. He then used a gendered anvil to smash the symbol of

Toussaint as a passive and nonviolent slave, remarking that Toussaint wished “every

black to be immolated in a manly defense of his liberty, rather than the infernal and

accursed system of negro slavery should again be established on that soil.” Toussaint

“considered it far better, that his sable countrymen should be DEAD FREEMEN,” rather

“than LIVING SLAVES.”30

The third commonality of these lectures was the linking of the histories of both

Haiti and the United States. Judging the accomplishments of Toussaint and his

revolutionary army superior to those of George Washington and his, these radicals

pointed out the failure of the American people to live up to the national ideals set forth in

both the Declaration of Independence and the Unites States Constitution. Langston

borrowed from the introduction of one of the most widely read biographical accounts of

29 Elliott, Heroes are Historic Men 38, 70. 30 Holly, “Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race,” 54, 49.

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Toussaint ever published, writing, “Toussaint TOuverture was the most extraordinary

man of his age, though he lived in an age remarkable for its extraordinary men.” 31

Though enslaved for nearly a-half century, he was “Superior to Napoleon and

Washington as a great military leader.”32 Brown argued, “Toussaint’s career as a

Christian, a statesman, and a general, will lose nothing by a comparison with that of

Washington. Each was the leader of an oppressed and outraged people, each had a

powerful enemy to contend with, and each succeeded in founding a government in the

New World. Toussaint’s government made liberty its watchword, incorporated it in its

constitution, abolished the slave-trade, and made freedom universal amongst the people.”

On the other hand, “Washington’s government incorporated slavery and the slave-trade,

and enacted laws by which chains were fastened upon the limbs of millions of people.

Toussaint liberated his countrymen; Washington enslaved a portion of his, and aided in

giving strength and vitality to an institution that will one day rend asunder the UNION

that he helped to form. “33 Holly declared the Haitian Revolution far greater an event than

that which resulted in the thirteen colonies winning their independence from England. He

referred to the Haitian Revolution as “the grandest political event of this or any other age.

In weighty causes, and wondrous and momentous features, it surpasses the American

revolution, in an incomparable degree. The revolution of this country was only the revolt

of a people already comparably free, independent, and highly enlightened.” The greatest

grievance of the American people “was the imposition of three pence per pound tax on

tea, by the mother country, without their consent. But the Haytian revolution was a revolt

31 Joseph Fr. Michaud, Biographie Universelle, Ancienne et Moderne. Nouvelle ed. (Paris: Michaud, 1854; Granz, Austria: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1968), 342. 32 Langston, “World’s Anti-Slavery Movement,” 57. 33 Brown, St. Domingo, 37.

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of an uneducated and menial class of slaves, against their tyrannical oppressors, who not

only imposed an absolute tax on their unrequited labor, but also usurped their very

bodies.” There was, Holly insisted, no comparison. “The obstacles to surmount, and the

difficulties to contend against, in the American revolution, when compared to those of the

Haytian, were, (to use a homely but classic phrase,) but a ‘tempest in a teapot,’ compared

to the dark and lurid thunder storm of the dissolving heavens.”34

These descriptions of Toussaint’s superiority over Washington, of the importance

of the Haitian Revolution over the American Revolution, constitute a fundamental

departure from the standard abolitionist narrative of the Haitian Revolution. For a half-

century, abolitionists from across the Atlantic labeled Toussaint the “the Black

Napoleon,” and “the Washington of St. Domingo.” Now, radical American abolitionists

preferred the memory of Toussaint and his revolution, to these white revolutionary icons

and their revolutions in France and the United States. An Ohio abolitionist reinforced the

growing status of the Haitian Revolution in the abolitionist imagination in summer of

1859, when suggesting in a letter published in the Weekly Anglo-African that African

Americans discontinue their celebration of the First of August. As historians Bruce Dain

and Mitch Kachun have demonstrated, for decades white and black abolitionists publicly

-J c celebrated the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean. Now,

however, this black writer questioned the viability of a holiday for an enslaved population

34 Holly, “Vindication of the Capacity of theNegro Race," 24-25. 35 Bruce Dain, “Haiti and Egypt in Early Black Racial Discourse in the United States,”Slavery and Abolition 14, 3 (December 1993): 139-61; Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915 (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 272.

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that did not fight for their liberation. “I should prefer, therefore, commemorating the

downfall of slavery, in St. Domingo.”

While the four men who lectured on the Haitian Revolution in the mid-1850s

shared similar inspiration, the motives of Holly and Brown deserve special attention.

Holly recited Haiti’s history to convince African Americans of Haiti’s attraction as a

home for colonists. He was among a rising number of African Americans in the middle of

the nineteenth century who saw no future for the black man in America. Though the

black colonization movement met with limited success, approximately two thousand

African Americans, including Holly, emigrated. Brown used the Haitian Revolution to

convince African Americans to stay and fight for freedom in the United States. Bom into

slavery decades after Haitian independence, Brown used the Haitain Revolution to call

for a violent end to slavery. He predicted a Second Haitian Revolution in the United

States, a bloody war of races, which would ultimately cleanse the United States of the

egregious sin of slavery and enable it to fulfill its national destiny. When this violent

revolution took place, he predicted, “the God of Justice will be on the side of the

36 “Our Cleveland Letter, ” Weekly Anglo-African, 6 August 1859. 37 This number apparently does not take into account the 453 emigrants to lie A ’Vache in 1863, many of whom returned. Chris Dixon,African America and Haiti: Black Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000), 178;Pine and Palm, 12 October 1861, 14 August 1862. Events of the 1850s re-ignited debate over the controversial issue of colonization, in black homes, churches, and communities. Chief among them where the Fugitive Slave Law, the Supreme Court’s Decision in the Dred Scott Case, and the Kansas and Nebraska Act of 1854. The black-led colonization movement of the 1850s differed from the earlier scheme of the 1820s, which was the work of the American Colonization Society, a paternalistic white organization founded in 1816 that sought to remove African Americans from the United States for the benefit of whites. There is no shortage of discussion of antebellum Haitian emigrationism and the two most prominent leaders of the second movement, Holly and Redpath. The most reliable account is Dixon,African America and Haiti-, See also, Willis D. Boyd, “James Redpath and American Negro Colonization of Haiti, 1860-62,”The Americas, 12 (1995): 169-82; James O ’Dell Jackson III, “The Origins of Pan-African Nationalism: Afro-American and Haytien Relations, 1800-1863,” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1976); Floyd J. Miller,The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787-1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); William Seraile, “Afro-American Emigration to Haiti During the American Civil War,”The Americas 35 (1978): 185-2000; David McEwen Dean,Defender o f the Race: James Theodore Holly, Black Nationalist Bishop (Boston: Lambeth Press, 1979); John McKivigan, “James Redpath and Black Reaction to the Haitian Emigration Bureau,”Mid-America 69 (1987): 139-53.

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oppressed blacks.” The indignation of southern slaves “would kindle a fire so hot that it

would melt their chains, drop by drop, until not a single link would remain; and the

revolution that was commenced in 1776 would then be finished, and the glorious

sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, ‘That all men are created equal, and

endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty,

and the pursuit of happiness,’ would be realized, and our government would no longer be

the scorn and contempt of the friends of freedom in other lands, but would really be the

LAND OF THE FREE AND HOME OF THE BRAVE.”38 There is a tendency to

bifurcate and counterpose antebellum black radicalism into two distinct spheres, the

advocates of colonization (black nationalists) like Holly, on one side, and those who

chose to stay in the United States and fight (integrationists) like Brown, on the other. 39

Historian Chris Dixon has shown, however, the ease with which both ideologies

coexisted and at times overlapped and borrowed from one another. Brown, for example,

though a leading opponent of colonization, worked as an agent of the Haitian Emigration

Bureau briefly.40 What is most relevant for our discussion is that on the eve of the Civil

War African Americans decided upon Haiti as the leading destination for black

emigrants. They preferred Haiti to alternative sites in Canada, Latin America, and West

Africa. In the aftermath of Holly’s lecture, black conversations on the history of Haiti

38 Brown, St. Domingo, 38. 39 Chris Dixon,African America and Haiti, 7-10. For a discussion of this tendency, see: Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 224, 231; The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 26; Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 5-6; James O. 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), xii; Patrick Rael,Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North, Introduction. 40 Dixon suggests “material opportunities” in the form of a guaranteed source of income for the agents of the Haitian Emigration Bureau, to explain the duplicitousness of Brown and others.African Americans and Haiti, 156.

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reached a fever pitch throughout the North. This is evidenced by both the historical

lectures as well as a considerable literature on Haiti that targeted black colonists.41 The

surge of interest in Haitian emigration reveals the extent to which African Americans

were readily identifying themselves with both Haiti and its people on the eve of the Civil

War.

The historical lectures on the Haitian Revolution and the conversations on Haitian

emigration were part of a growing trend in the years before the Civil War in which

radical abolitionists invoked Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution in public orations and

printed texts. Not since the first Haitian emigration movement of the 1820s had so many

Americans talked about Haiti. Now, however, black and white abolitionists increasingly

used the Haitian Revolution to encourage blacks to stay and fight for freedom and

equality at home. A public celebration in 1858 in Boston is instructive. Here the

prominent black dentist and doctor John Rock came to the defense of American slaves at

a celebration of the anniversary of the death of the warrior patriot Crispus Attucks at

Boston’s famed Faneuil Hall. Responding to the charge that black men were, unlike other

races, unwilling and unable to fight for freedom, Rock used the Haitian Revolution as a

touchstone. Insisting that Europeans had never battled blacks fairly, Rock avowed, “if the

white man will take the trouble to fight the black man in Africa or in Hayti, and fight him

as fair as the black man will fight him there—if the black man does not come off victor, I

41 Benjamin Hunt, Remarks on Hayti as a Place of Settlement for African-Americans and on the Mulatto as a Race for the Tropics (Philadelphia: T.B. Pugh, 1860); Joseph Warren Fabens,Facts About Santo Domingo: Applicable to the Present Crisis: An Address Delivered Before the American Geographical and Statistical Society at New York, April 3, 1862 (New York: George Putnam, 1862);In the Tropics, by a Settler in Santo Domingo, 4th ed. (New York: Carleton, etc, 1863); James Theodore Holly,Thoughts on Hayti, Anglo-African Magazine (June through November 1859); James Redpath,A Guide to Hayti (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860); In March 1861, Redpath purchased theWeekly Anglo-African and turned it into the pro-emigrationist horn, Pine and Palm-, he, moreover, placed advertisements seeking Haitian colonists in Douglass ’ Monthly for nearly a year.

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am deceived in his prowess.” In a statement that reveals Rock’s understanding of the role

that history played in the subjugation of the black race, he professed that the “greatest

battles” fought by the white race “have been upon paper.” Rock cited the black man’s

record in Haiti’s as proof of black manhood: “The history of the bloody struggles for

freedom in Haiti, in which the black man whipped the French and the English and gained

their independence . . . will be a lasting refutation of the malicious aspersions of our

enemies.” He then linked the black man’s violent struggle for freedom on Haiti with that

in the United States. In the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and Mexico, black

men spilled their blood for liberty, Rock reminded his audience. “The history of the

struggles for the liberty of the U.S. ought to silence every American calumniater.” The

evidence was irrefutable. Blacks fought for freedom before, and would do it again.42

After Rock, arguably the greatest orator in an age of great oratory took the podium.

Wendell Phillips, the radical, Harvard-educated, Boston Brahmin expounded upon

Rock’s history of Haiti. In celebrating black resistance, Phillips questioned the military

supremacy of the white race. “The only race in history that ever took the sword into their

hands, and cut their chains, is the black race of St. Domingo. Let that fact go for what its

worth.” Phillips predicted that since Europeans had never sacrificed for freedom to the

extent of the black man in Haiti, slavery in the United States was doomed. Soon the black

man would respond to charge of the inferiority of his race and say, “I summon before the

jury, Africa, with her savage millions, that has maintained her independence for two or

three thousand years; I summon Egypt with the arts, I summon St. Domingo with the

sword, and I choose to be tried in the great company of the millions, not alone!” “In that

42 “Speech of Dr. Rock,”The Liberator, 12 March 1858.

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company,” Phillips continued, “he may claim to have shown as much courage as any

other race—full as much.”43

No event in the years leading up the Civil War illuminates how the revival of

public memory of the Haitian Revolution both advanced and attended the growing

militancy of the abolitionist movement than John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry,

Virginia in October 1859. The attack came when Brown and twenty-one devoted

followers, including three of his sons and five free blacks, stormed the federal arsenal at

Harper’s Ferry. They came with hundreds of sharp pikes, which they intended to

distribute to local slaves whom they expected to join the insurrection. Within thirty-six

hours, however, the attack was over, when a company of the United States Marines under

Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant Jeb Stuart stormed an engine house in which they

had cornered Brown and a number of his men. Lee arrested a bloodied Brown, along with

six of his followers. The state of Virginia then tried, convicted, and hung Brown and the

remaining survivors. Of the other fourteen rebels, seven died in the attack; seven others

escaped. They had taken the lives of four people and wounded nine.44 No individual

figures as prominently in the historical literature of the causes of the Civil War than John

Brown. Popular and scholarly books and articles are devoted to nearly every aspect of his

life, personality, and death. Today, most historians agree that Brown was not a madman;

he was, rather, a bold and defiant rebel whose inspiration spmng from the same fountain

that violent black rebels drank. John Stauffer’s recent study of a small group of radical

abolitionists, including Brown, is informing. According to Stauffer, these men lived blind

43 “Speech of Wendell Phillips,” The Liberator, 12 March 1858. 44 Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 288-301. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 369-71; Oswald Garrison Villard,John Brown: A Biography 1800-1859 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1929, 1929), 426-55.

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to the cultural realities of racial distinctions. Despite the various shades of their skin, they

were all black men at heart.45 The discussion above on the revolts and conspiracies of

Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner indicates, memories of the Haitian Revolution

had an effect on African American slave resistance in the United States. Consequently,

the deep impression that the Haitian Revolution made on Brown’s thinking deserves

attention.

The evidence linking Brown’s raid to the Haitian Revolution is compelling.

Richard Realf, an English immigrant and abolitionist journalist who befriended Brown in

Kansas, testified before a United States Senate Investigating Committee after Brown’s

arrest. Asked about Brown’s motivations, Realf responded that Brown “had posted

himself in relation to the wars of Toussaint L’Ouverture; he had become thoroughly

acquainted with the wars in Hayti and the islands round about; and from all these things

he had drawn the conclusion, believing, as he stated there he did believe, and as we all (if

I may judge from myself) believed, that upon the first intimation of a plan formed for the

liberation of the slaves, they would immediately rise all over the Southern States.” It was

because of Brown’s study of the Haitian Revolution and wars of liberation that his plan

emerged “spontaneously” in his mind.46 Probably the most convincing evidence of

Brown’s desire to reenact another Haitian Revolution comes from the testimony of one

45 John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 46 Report [of] the Select Committee of the Senate Appointed to Inquire into the Late Invasion and Seizure of the Public Property at Harper’s Ferry (Washington), 96; The decision to invade Harper’s Ferry, as opposed to alternative locations, is further proof of Brown’s faith in the Haitian insurrectionary model. Brown considered at least ten other locales as potential points of invasion. What these places shared in common was the location of federal forts or arsenals. What distinguished Harper’s Ferry were mountains. Students of the Haitian Revolution like Brown were aware of the tradition of slave marronage in Haiti, as detailed in various abolitionist publications. They knew of Toussaint’s use of the mountains to successfully wage guerilla warfare against Europe’s best armies. It is likely for this reason that Brown considered the mountains of western Virginia and Maryland the key to a successful American slave insurrection. Oates,To Purge This Land With Blood, 213-14; Holly, “Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race,” 29-30.

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his jailors. In an interview that appeared in a popular New York newspaper nearly fifty

years after Brown’s death, Colonel William Fellows, the sole surviving prison guard,

reported that Brown, in the last days of his life, busied himself reading the Bible, Thomas

Carlyle’sFrench Revolution, Edward Gibbon’sDecline and Fall o f the Roman Empire,

“and a biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture.” One day, Brown told Fellows Toussaint’s

life story and “put that poor black man alongside Socrates, Luther and John Hampden as

the world’s heroes.” Brown shared with his jailer that “he had read and reread all the

literature he could find about L’Ouverture for a dozen years.” Brown further revealed that

he went to Harper’s Ferry, hoping to reenact a Second Haitian Revolution in the slave

states with himself cast in the role of Toussaint. Fellows maintained, “I know that he

patterned his life after the San Domingan and that he viewed his own death on the

scaffold in the same light as the execution of L’Ouverture.”47

Brown’s raid takes on a different character when we learn that both the men who

marched into battle alongside him and those who backed the invasion financially shared

both his veneration of Toussaint as well as his dream of a Second Haitian Revolution.

Francis Jackson Meriam, a white abolitionists from Massachusetts, visited Haiti just

months before the raid. He accompanied the radical abolition writer James Redpath who

intended to report on the progress of the nation and its people.48 Among the items

Meriam brought back to the United States from Haiti was an original portrait of

Toussaint.49 The portrait, which shows a dignified and uniformed black general from

profile, is copied from an engraving, which first appeared on the frontispiece of a

47 “Saw John Brown Hanged,”New York Sun, 13 February 1898. 48 James Redpath, ed.,A Guide to Hayti (New York and Boston: Haytian Bureau of Migration, 1861), 9. 49 “Toussaint L’Ouverture,”The Commonwealth, 9 June 1866.

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biography of Toussaint published in Paris and Charleston, South Carolina in 1802.50 That

Meriam displayed his rare piece of artwork in front of his brothers-in-arms is likely. It is

moreover tempting to envision Toussaint’s image peering over the shoulders of the men

who in 1859 plotted the raid at Harper’s Ferry. John Brown’s eldest son, John Brown, Jr.,

who served as his father’s “special intelligence agent” for the raid, likewise demonstrated

an affinity for Toussaint.51 In a letter that indicates the thinking of Brown’s men

regarding American slaves and the likelihood of their participation in a violent revolt,

Brown, Jr., wrote to the President of Haiti shortly after his father’s execution: “So it is,

then, only the body of TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE which sleeps in the tomb; his soul

visits the cabins of the slaves of the South when night is spread over the face of nature.

The ears of our American slaves hear his voice in the wind-gusts which sweep over the

prairies of Texas, of Arkansas and Missouri; his voice finds an echo in the immense

valleys of Florida, among the pines of the Carolinas, in the Dismal Swamp and upon the

mountain-tops, proclaiming that the despots of America shall yet know the strength of the

toiler’s arm, and that he who would be free must himself strike the first blow.” 52

Memory of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution buttressed the antislavery

philosophies of the members of the Secret Six, a group of northeastern abolitionists who

secretly funded Brown’s attack. Francis Sanbom was a Massachusetts educator well

versed in Haitian history and especially the life of Tousssaint. He had read James

Franklin’s history of Haiti, the classic biographies of Toussaint by Marcus Rainsford and

50 Louis Dubroca, The Life of Toussaint Louverture: Late General in Chief and Governor of the Island of Saint Domingo: With Many Particulars Never Before Published: to which is Subjoined, an Account of the First Operations of the French Army under General Leclerc (Charleston: T. W. Bowen, 1802); Fritz Daguillard, Enigmatic in his Glory: An Exhibit Commemorating the Bicentennial of the Death of Toussaint Louverture (Port-au-Prince: Mu§see du Pantheon National Haiti, 2003), 7-8. 51 Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood, 223. 52 “The Haytians and John Brown,”New York Times 8 August 1860.

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Victor Schoelcher, as well as Toussaint’s memoirs, which were first published in Paris in

1855.53 In a Sermon delivered at Music Hall in Boston, Sanborn revealed his veneration

of Toussaint, asking, “I challenge all history to parallel the military genius and the

statesmanship of this negro, who had been a slave all the best years of his life.”54

Theodore Parker, one of Brown’s more recognized accomplices was a fiery Unitarian

minister and orator who considered it a duty of all free people to aid slaves in gaining

liberation. Jeffrey Rossbach suggests that it was William Wells Brown’s lecture, “St.

Domingo,” which convinced Parker of both the necessity and utility of violence.55 In a

letter to an abolitionist ally explaining his radical stance, Parker admitted American

slaves’ aversion to violence, but added, “there is a limit even to the negro’s forbearance.

San Domingo is not a great way off.” Parker predicted that the day was coming was

American slaves would no longer needed the help of white men like John Brown. “In the

Slave States, there is many a possible San Domingo, which may become actual any day;

and, if not in 1860, then in some other ‘year of our Lord.’” Parker welcomed that day,

explaining that it would expose the shortcomings of the United States, and then enable

the nation to realize fundamental ideals. “We are always talking about ‘Liberty,’” he

began. “We continually praise our Fathers ‘who fought the Revolution.’ We build

monuments to commemorate even the humblest beginning of that great national work.

53 James Franklin, The Present State o f Hayti (Saint Domingo): With Remarks on its Agriculture, Commerce, Laws, Religion, Finances, and Population, etc., etc. (London: J. Murray, 1828); Toussaint Louverture,Memoires du General Toussaint-L ’Ouverture: Ecrits par Lui-meme,Ppouvant Sservir a I’Histoire de Sa Vie, edited by Joseph Saint-Remy (Paris: Pagnerre, 1853); Thomas Madiou,Histoire d ’Haiti, 3 vols. (Port-au-Prince: J. Courtois, 1847-48); Marcus Rainsford,An Historical Account o f the Black Empire: Comprehending a View of The Principal Transactions in the Revolution of Saint Domingo; with Its Antient and Modern State (London: James Cundee, 1805); Victor Schoelcher, Histoire de l’Esclavage Pendant les Deux Demieres Annees, 2 vols. (Paris: Pagnerre, 1847). 54 “Emancipation: A Sermon Preached at Music Hall, Boston, March 31, 1861 by F. B. Sanborn,” Supplement to the Weekly Anglo-African, 20 April 1861. 55 Jeffrey Rossbach,Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, the Secret Six, and a Theory of Slave Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 154-55.

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Once a year, we stop all ordinary work, and give up a whole day to the noisiest kind of

rejoicing for the War of Independence.” Parker asked finally, “Do you suppose this will

fail to produce its effect on the black man, one day?”56

James Redpath neither participated in Brown’s raid nor assisted in its financing to

any great extent; nonetheless, perhaps no other abolitionist had as great an impact on

Brown’s decision to launch a Second Haitian Revolution.57 Bom in Scotland, Redpath

emigrated with his family to the United States in 1849, and quickly established himself as

a successful printer and writer. After accepting a position with Horace Greeley’s New

York Tribune, Redpath traveled throughout the South, spending years in “Bloody

Kansas.” Redpath published Roving Editor: or, Talks with the Slaves in the Southern

States, in 1858, a book consisting of transcriptions of the author’s clandestine

conversations with southern slaves. The interviews exposed much about slaves’

discontent and their willingness to use violence. In the book, Redpath revealed his

sympathies for violent slave resistance, writing, “I now believe that the speediest method

of abolishing slavery, and of ending the eternal hypocritical hubbub in Congress and the

country, is to incite a few scores of rattling insurrections—in a quiet gentlemanly way—

simultaneously in different parts of the country, and by a little wholesale slaughter, to

arouse the conscience of the people against the wrong embodied in Southern

56 John Weiss,Life and Correspondence o f Theodore Parker, Minister of the Twenty-Eight Congregational Society, Boston, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 443 & 445 Broadway. 1864), 174-175. 57 The definitive biography of Redpath is yet to be written. For a brief and accurate description of his role as an advocate of colonization, see Dixon,African America and Haiti, Chapter Four. The best description of Redpath’s radicalism is John R. McKivigan, “James Redpath, John Brown, and Abolitionist Advocacy of Slave Insurrection,”Civil War History 37, No. 4 (1991): 293-313. Other reliable accounts of Redpath’s antebellum activities include Charles F. Flomer,The Life o f James Redpath and the Development o f the Modern Lyceum (New York: Barse & Hopkins, 1926); alse see John R. McKivigan’s introduction to James Redpath, Roving Editor; or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (New York: A. B. Burdick, 1859; reprint, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).

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institutions.”58 Redpath’s abolitionist activities were not limited to his writings. As he

traveled the slave states, he aided more than a dozen slaves in their escape and proposed

the organization of a group of radical abolitionists with the name “apostles of freedom,”

who would aid in the liberation of additional slaves. While in Kansas, Redpath began a

close relationship with Brown and became an important “intermediary” between Brown

and the Secret Six.59 Redpath was infatuated with Haiti and its history. He visited Haiti in

the winter of 1859 and returned twice more in the next year. On his journeys, he traded

stories of Toussaint with aged citizens and veterans of the revolution who had fought

alongside the great black general.60 That Redpath and Brown discussed the Haitian

Revolution is apparent. John R. McKivigan writes, “It does not appear to be a

coincidence that during their Kansas years both Redpath and Brown shifted from

advocating small-scale projects for assisting slaves to escape to plans for a massive slave

insurrection.”61 Redpath’s advocacy of slave insurrection would prove short-lived;

nonetheless, no other abolitionist except Brown surpassed Redpath’s radicalism in the

years leading up to the Civil War.

Nothing highlights the relationship between the Haitian Revolution and Brown’s

raid more than the public reaction in Haiti. Haitian journalists filled columns with the

news of Brown’s arrest, trial, and execution. The entire nation officially mourned his

death for three days, and the government renamed the primary thoroughfare in Port-au-

Prince John Brown Boulevard. Haitian citizens raised some twenty thousand dollars for

58 James Redpath,The Roving Editor; or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (New York: A. B. Burdick, 1859), 129. 59 Oates, Purge This Land With Blood, 149-51, 253-54, 284. 60 “Toussaint L’Ouverture,”Commonwealth, 9 June 1866. 61 McKivigan, “James Redpath,” 313.

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Brown’s family and the families of the other dead rebels.62 An American living in Haiti

described one funerary ceremony in which Haitians positioned a replica of Brown’s

casket in the center of a Catholic cathedral. They surrounded the casket with burning

candles and incense. On the front of the casket they placed a piece of satin “on which was

printed, in letters of gold, '’John Brown, heroique martyr de la liberte des noir.’’ “63 The

Weekly Anglo-African published a letter it received from Haiti just weeks after the

incursion. The letter reveals both the authors’ reliance on the memories of the Haitian

Revolution as well as their identification with Brown and the slaves he gave his life for.

“As Haytians, having constantly present in our imagination the remembrance of 1804, the

dawning of our national existence, we are astonished that a Spartacus more fortunate than

John Brown, has not yet arisen from the very midst of the slaves of the South, showing

them the reality and its triumph! As Haytians and descendents of the martyrs of glorious

independence, we believe that the means to abolish slavery is to oppose force to force!.'"

Violence was requisite.64

John Brown’s actions likewise generated a flood of popular interest in the Haitian

Revolution in the United States. Abolitionists’ eulogizes, which were performed in front

of large crowds by celebrated public speakers and later reprinted in popular newspapers,

are examples. Abolitionist and Congregationalist minister George B. Cheever deployed

the words of William Wordsworth, in his defense of Brown at New York’s Cooper

Institute. “Some men are afraid to praise him [Brown]; yet he is powerful even in that

62 “Hayti and the Martyrs o f Harper’s Ferry. A CARD,”The Commonwealth, 9 October 1863; Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, “Images of Hayti: The Construction of an Afro-American Lieu de Memoire,”Callaloo 15, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 839. 63 “John Brown in Hayti,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 24 March 1860. 64 “How Can It Be Abolished,”Weekly Anglo-African, 27 April 1861.

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fear. And of him may be said what Wordsworth wrote of a hero like spirit, Toussaint

L’Ouverture—”

Thou has left behind Powers that will work for thee, air, earth and skies; There’s not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exaltations, agonies And love, and man’s unconquerable mind”65

In “The Lesson of the Hour: An Address on the Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry,” Wendell

Phillips defended Brown’s actions before a large audience in Brooklyn, New York.

Phillips’s message reached beyond the lecture hall when the speech appeared in print

form in prominent newspapers in Boston and New York. Phillips warned Americans that

Brown’s raid was only a taste of what was to follow if they did not abolish slavery. He

pointed out that the raid did not meet the requirements of a slave insurrection. The only

people in history “that ever, after a century of oppression retained the vigor, and right,

and character of his emancipation with his own hand in the blood of the dominant race,

was the despised, and calumniated, and slandered blacks of San Domingo. They were

their own leaders, and without any assistance abolished Slavery throughout the land in

which they lived.” The Haitian Revolution was “the lesson of the age,” Phillips

announced. It was a lesson because on Haiti slaves set a precedent that was bound to

repeat itself in the United States. Brown’s raid was only “the first fruit of the seed planted

by slavery.”66 More would come later—revolution was inevitable. Phillips militant

65 “John Brown’s ‘Treason’ Justified by the Word of God,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 31 December 1859. 66 Wendell Phillips, “The Lesson of the Hour. Address of Wendell Phillips on the Insurrection at Harper’s F e r r yDouglass’ Monthly, December 1859.

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defense of Brown struck a chord with northern audiences, who shortly after his Brooklyn

speech, requested he repeat one of his more radical lectures.

Phillips had performed “Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Hero of St. Domingo”

before, yet the number of performances increased noticeably after Brown’s raid.67 In

1860, Phillips hit the Northeastern Lyceum circuit and repeated the oration at a variety of

places, including a small church in upper-state New York, New York City’s Cooper

Institute, and Philadelphia’s National Hall. In the oration, Toussaint memorialized

history’s most successful slave rebellion, and both predicted and even encouraged its

replication in the United States. The oration would become a classic of American

literature, and forever change the American memory of Toussaint and the Haitian

Revolution. There are no extant drafts of the original lecture. We can nonetheless

reconstruct its basic frame from published newspaper reports.68 Phillips evoked the

Heroic Model of the Haitian Revolution, centering Toussaint firmly in the center of its

history.69 In the oration, one sees traces of the writings of British abolitionists and the

67 The Journal of Charlotte Forten provides the earliest mention of Phillips’s “Toussaint L’Ouverture” that I have found. Forten writes on December 16, 1857, “This eve. heard a splendid lecture on Toussaint by our noble Mr. Phillips. It was a glorious and well deserved tribute to the ‘First of the Blacks.’ My enthusiastic enjoyments knew no bounds. What heightened it was that a large part of the audience was composed of people who would not go to an avowedly Anti-Slavery lecture. But they hand a grand dose of Anti-slavery and Anti-prejudice to-night. It was enough for them to hear him say, ashe alone could say it— ’Ihate prejudice against color; I despise it! ’ In concluding he said, as nearly as I can remember ‘I would compare Toussaint to Cromwell, but Cromwell shed much blood in clutching at a throne. But Toussaint walked by natural gravitation into the leadership of his people, without a crime. I would compare him to Napoleon, but Napoleon’s whole career was covered with cheatery.— This black chief never‘ broke his word.’ I would compare him to Washington—but Washington held slaves. — This man’s hands were clean. There are none worthy to compare with him, inpurity of character, save Tell and Jay.”The Journal o f Charlotte Forten, With an Introduction and Notes by Ray Allen Billington (New York: The Dryden Press, Inc., 1953), 97. Another early account comes from the Wendell Phillips Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge. Early Evening Transcript (Boston), 28 January 1858. The writer remarked, “Rarely has a Boston audience enjoyed an opportunity of listening to an address, fulfilling the requirements o f a popular lecture to a greater degree, than last evening.” 68 “Toussaint L’Ouverture,”New York Times, 1 February 1860. 69 Observers noted that the peripatetic Phillips normally carried a copy of Martineau’s biography of Toussaint with him to lectures. Vera Wheatley, The Life and Work o f Harriet Martineau (Fair Lawn, New Jersey: Essential Books, 1957), 218.

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more recent and more militant American narratives. Phillips shattered the idea of white

racial supremacy and offered an explicit warning to those who wished to maintain the

institution of slavery. He accentuated Toussaint’s blackness. “He had not in his veins one

single drop of Saxon blood. Bom of an African stolen from the coasts of his native

country, no mixture had ever crept into his veins. “ Phillips highlighted Toussaint’s

militancy along with that of the rank-and-file Haitian slave. “Do you say the black man

has no courage? Go to St. Domingo. Bend down and ask the graves of those fifty-two

thousand Frenchmen who perished and were buried there. Go to France and ask for the

graves of the eight thousand soldiers who skulked away under the cover of the English

Jack.” “And,” Phillips added contemptuously regarding Brown’s raid, “if that is not

enough, come home, if you please, by the way of quaking Virginia.” The oration’s finale

became legend: “You think me a fanatic to-night, for you read history, not with your

eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the

Muse of History will put Phoecion for the Greek, and Brutus for the Roman, Hampden

for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of

our earlier civilization, and John Brown the ripe fruit of our noonday, then dipping her

pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier,

the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L’Ouverture.” 70

The public’s reaction to the lecture clearly separates it from all previous lectures

on the Haitian Revolution. The response was in fact unprecedented. Wells Brown, Elliot,

Holly, and Langston performed their orations in front of predominately black audiences,

in small clubs, rooms, and halls. Because of Phillip’s reputation as a public speaker,

however, audiences consisted of men and women from all walks of life, black and white,

70 “The St. Domingo Insurrection,”Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, 5 February 1860.

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conservative and radical, Republican and Democrat. Phillip’s performance of “Toussaint

L’Ouverture” at New York’s Cooper Instititute reveals northerners’ decidedly

oppositional reaction. Some approved of the lecture. The New York Times and the

Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch reprinted the lecture in its entirety and reported that at the

Cooper Institute, a large gathering of men and women came in spite of inclement weather

and paid twenty-five cents to attend. Once inside, they greeted Phillips with “loud

applause” when he rose to speak.71 The New York Tribune praised the lecture at length,

and indicated the controversy surrounding the address. Men and women crowded into the

enormous lecture hall, in spite of the fact that rumors circulated that Democratic New

York City Mayor Fernando Wood asked Phillips not to perform. As a result “many ladies

were intimidated in consequence.” In spite of the warning, “Phillips gave his lecture

without interruption. When he said that Toussaint had that rare mixture of fanaticism and

bravery which was found only in great men like the Cromwells, the Bonapartes, and the

John Browns, there was a persistent attempt at hissing, drowned, however, by more

pertinacious cheering.” Nevertheless, “the wonderful charm of his eloquence held the

audience in a spell of silence, rarely broken by irrepressible bursts of applause. An

allusion to ‘quaking Virginia’ was received with much laughter and applause, and a final

reference to John Brown called out renewed applause and hisses.” I') Some clearly

disapproved of the lecture.73 A writer in the New York Herald dismissed it as “a political

71 “News of the Day,” “Wendell Phillips,”New York Times, 28 January 1860; “The St. Domingo Insurrection,”Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, 5 February 1860; “Toussaint L’Ouverture,”New York Times, 1 February 1860. 72 “Mr. Phillipps’s Lecture,”New York Daily Tribune, 1 February 1860. 73 Earlier Charlotte Forten recorded in the National Anti-Slavery Standard that northerners had requested the President of a New England Lyceum prohibit Phillips and other abolitionists from performing. Forten wrote that the “auditors” of Phillips’s lecture on Toussaint “certainly could not resist the enchantments of the orator’s eloquence, even while strongly rebelling against his fearlessly avowed sentiments.” “Glimpses of New England,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 19 June 1858.

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speech of the deepest abolition dye,” and accused Phillips and other lecturers of

attempting to influence the upcoming presidential election.74 Another writer lamented the

printing of the oration in the New York Herald, “Could the force of fanaticism further

go?” Borrowing from the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution, the writer

insisted that Toussaint and his slave army did not win their freedom. “This bloodiest and

darkest deed in the page of history was the result of emancipation. The French

revolutionists, in their wild excess, set the negroes free. Soon did France retrace her

steps; but it was too late—the ferocious passions of the black race were let loose, and

horrors took place which have no parallel in the annals of mankind.” What of Phillips’s

rendering of Toussaint? The writer insisted that the “savage chief’ committed

“barbarities too revolting to describe.” Phillips’s treatment of George Washington was

especially troubling. “To worship Toussaint as a hero and statesman superior to

Washington is not more rational than to worship the bull of the ancient Egyptians as a

deity superior to Christ.”75

Phillips’s performance in Albany, New York illuminates the growing demand for

“Toussaint L’Ouverture” on the eve of the Civil War as well as its polarizing effect on

northern audiences. Phillips traveled to Albany at the request of the Lecturing Committee

of the Young Men’s Association. After lecturing in central New York to some five

hundred paying customers, he arrived in Albany prepared to repeat “Toussaint

L’Ouverture” at a local Congregational Church. But after organizers erected a platform

and brought in extra seats to accommodate the overflow crowd, Trustees of the church

refused to allow Phillips to take the stage. One threatened to resign should Phillips be

74 “Republican Lecturers on the Stump,”New York Herald, 7 February 1860. 75 “The St. Domingo Insurrection,”New York Herald, 1 February 1860; “Wendell Phillips and His Gods,” New York Herald, 3 February 1860.

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allowed to speak.76 It was an act one observer called a “senseless move,” as it would

“only serve to add to Mr. Phillips’s popularity.”77 A number of the Trustees took

Phillips’s side, but to no avail. Finally, Phillips removed himself to the modest-sized hall

of the Young Men’s Association where he finally performed the oration without

interruption. Still, not everyone who expected to see the oration was satisfied. One writer,

who after arriving at the hall to find “every inch of room was occupied . . . was

compelled, with hundreds of others, to turn away disappointed.”• 78

Phillips’s attention to Toussaint spurred imitators. In Boston, Benjamin C. Clark,

Esq., offered a radically different biographical sketch of Toussaint. 70 A writer for the

Boston Post offered comment: “I have just returned from listening to a most interesting

lecture upon Hayti, or St. Domingo . . . I shall not attempt even an abstract of this lecture,

as many of your readers have already heard it, and those who have not will probably have

the opportunity at some repetition by Mr. Clark.” The writer celebrated Clark’s version of

Toussaint. “This depraved and sensual brute had been encircled by so rosy an

atmosphere, invented by the fertile fancy of a distinguished lecturer, that it was a relief to

see him despoiled of his gorgeous plumage, and to see the Satyr in his true and naked

deformity.” Clark’s greatest accomplishment, according to the observer, lie in his denial

of Phillip’s comparison of Toussaint with Washington. Clark’s oration “rebuked in

indignant terms this false, if not malignant parallel.” Upon learning that Clark denied

requests to give the lecture to the public in print form, the writer added, “it is to be hoped

76 Undated Newspaper Clipping, Wendell Phillips Papers. 77 “An Act of Folly,”Daily Knickerbocker, 3 February 1860, Wendell Phillips Papers. 78 Undated Newspaper Clipping, Wendell Phillips Papers. 79Boston Post, April 1860, Wendell Phillips Papers. This is presumably Benjamin C. Clark, the author of numerous tracts at mid-century suggesting Haiti and the Caribbean as places of both American colonists and investment.

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that he will not be unwilling to repeat it, as no man possesses more ability to shed light

upon a subject heretofore involved in such darkness and obscurity.”

Parodies of Phillips’s “Toussaint L’Ouverture” in widely read illustrated

periodicals signaled both its controversial nature and the arrival of both the lecture and

the subject into popular culture. A critic in Frank Leslie's Weekly Illustrated held nothing

back in a racially charged jest. The article asserted that Phillips’s oration “tested the

masonwork of the Cooper Institute,” as the abolitionist eulogized “a bloodthirsty negro,”

who murdered whites with impunity. The writer welcomed the comparison of Toussaint

and Washington, as it was Phillips, “the worshipper of a poisoning nigger,” who “placed

the founder of our Republic near Toussaint! When a man puts Z at the beginning of the

alphabet, the letter A cannot fail to be at the other end.” The writer warned of the ideas of

this radical abolitionist. “The next time you catch Wendell Phillips talking such nonsense,

O A don’t put him m a straight waistcoat, and don’t take him to the Utica Asylum.” Vanity

Fair mimicked the popular newspapers that published Phillips’s oration and included

within the text a series of bracketed stage directions, which cued readers to audiences’

responses. The article described the audience’ reaction throughout the course of the

lecture. At one point, “[the cheering and applause were really terrific, and one old

gentleman had to be carried off the scene, apparently no longer able to control his

excitement]”; at another, “[Great excitement among the ladies, which we happily settled

without interference from the Police]’; following the conclusion, “[The audience

dispersed amidst vociferous applause, hideous groans and cheering, that lasted for several

minutes].” An illustration accompanied the text. Adorned in the tight garb of a theatrical

80 “Anglo-Saxon Niggerdom,”Leslie’s Illustrated, 11 February 1860.

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performer, Phillips stands before those he entertains. He is an actor, and the subject of his

lecture is merely a source of theater, something to amuse, scoff at, and dismiss. 81

In the decade before the Civil War, radical abolitionists deployed the Haitian

Revolution to bring about the violent end of slavery. The result was an avalanche of

printed and spoken words that reminded northerners of the ultimate triumph of an

enslaved people against their masters. Memory of the Haitian Revolution alerted them to

what lie ahead if they failed to bring about the abolition of slavery. Radical abolitionists

celebrated Toussaint as a Slave Soldier, a man willing to fight and die for both individual

and collective freedom. In doing so, they took the United States to task for failing to

fulfill its national promise. The Haitian Revolution resonated with abolitionists who

found themselves immersed in the increasingly violent sectional conflict over slavery.

But even on the eve of the Civil War, few were willing to celebrate the revolution as

these black and white radicals did. Most northerners wanted neither disunion nor a

violent slave revolt to take place like the one that took place on Haiti. They responded to

the spoken and printed words of radical abolitionists with a combination of disdain and

indifference. White southerners reacted to the northern revival of public memory of the

Haitian Revolution more extremely.

81 “Lecture at Cooper Institute,”Vanity Fair, 18 February 1860.

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“HORRORS OF ST. DOMINGO”: MEMORY AND THE MAKING OF THE

CONFEDERATE NATION

White southerners responded with alarm to the revival of public memory of the

Haitian Revolution in the North. After John Brown’s raid, an increasing number called

for the immediate dissolution of the Union. Debates on secession resulted in an explosion

of popular memory of the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution. In speeches,

articles, and books, southern politicians, planters, writers, and ministers used the Haitian

Revolution to argue the necessity of secession. Silencing Toussaint, they made the trope

of the “horrors of St. Domingo” part and parcel of the public dialogue on secession and

war. They moreover made it a touchstone of a new nation. There was much to gain,

secessionists argued, from the formation of a confederation of slave states. It would

insure the perpetuation of the institution of slavery, remove the threat of slave violence,

and secure once and for all the supremacy of the white race. This chapter examines the

explosion of the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution on the eve of the Civil

War, with a focus on the time-period between John Brown’s raid and the start of the war.

Like radical abolitionists in the North, southern secessionists put the Haitian Revolution

to different uses. Resurrecting the tropes of the proslavery narrative, they exploited

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existing fears of slave insurrection. Reminding white southerners of the likelihood of a

repetition of the “horrors of St. Domingo” on American soil if the slave states remained

in the Union, they at last achieved independence.

This chapter also considers the North. The extent to which the proslavery

narrative of the Haitian Revolution permeated northern oral and print culture while

southerners pondered secession, testifies to a shared racial consciousness among white

Americans that neither secession nor rebellion could eradicate. Northern Democrats who

deployed the Haitian Revolution in their conversations on secession reinforced the

existence of a cross-sectional racial alliance that would eventually outlive both the

Confederacy and the Civil War. Nonetheless, they vehemently opposed secession. They

used the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution to prevent both the disintegration

of the Union and an ensuing war. Confirming white southerners’ fears of the existence of

an abolitionist conspiracy to spread slave rebellion, they called on moderate and

conservative northerners to resist the ideas and arguments of their radical sectional

neighbors. Expressing racial solidarity with white southerners—a people they

acknowledged lived in a dangerous society perched on the precipice of a massive slave

revolt—they invoked the “horrors of St. Domingo” to insure that abolitionists failed in

reaching their dual objectives of ending slavery and destroying the nation. The popular

explosion of the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution in both sections reveals

much about white Americans’ ideas of race on the eve of the Civil War. It moreover

illuminates the extent to which the public memory of the Haitian Revolution helped make

that war.

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John Brown’s raid amplified the public memory of the Haitian Revolution

throughout the South. White southerners as they had done before when threatened with

slave rebellion, revealed their fears of their bondsmen and bondswomen, of a repetition

of the “horrors of St. Domingo.” One writer compared Brown’s attack to Nat Turner’s

rebellion, when “Haiti and St. Domingo had been imitated.” Brown “treasonably and

murderously led an armed invasion of this same state to liberate and arm the slaves and

subject the helpless women and children to a repetition of the these scenes of horror on a

more extended scale.”1 The “outrages at Harper’s Ferry” provoked one Virginian to

pause and reflect on the possibility of a South without slavery. The morality of bondage,

of whether slavery was right, was not at issue. What mattered was that the end of slavery

meant the ruin of the South. All would suffer, especially the slaves. Without direction and

support, they would hunger and want. This would inevitably lead to “such scenes of

plunder, rapine and murder, as St. Domingo never witnessed.”2 An editorialist on the

front page of the Charleston Mercury opined on the ultimate consequence of life in the

South should abolitionists finish what Brown started: “A war of races—a war of

extermination—must arise, like that which took place in St. Domingo.” When the Second

Haitian Revolution began, “The midnight glare of the incendiary torch, will illuminate

the country from one end to another; while pillage, violence, murder, poison and rape

will fill the air with the demonic revelry, of all the bad passions of an ignorant, semi-

barbarous race, urged to madness by the licentious teaching of our Northern brethren.”3

While walking through the streets of Columbia, South Carolina, a Virginia militiaman

1 John Allan Wyeth,With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1914), 93. 2 “The Sectional Issue,”New York Times, 5 January 1860. 3 “Slaveholders and Non-Slaveholders of the South,”Charleston Mercury, 1 November 1860.

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encountered a local college professor, who spoke of the widespread fear of slave

rebellion in the wake of Brown’s raid. Defending the reaction of white southerners to the

escalating crisis, the professor reiterated the need for the South Carolina to secede from

the Union, for if it failed to do so, “she was to be St. Domingois’d.”4

Media coverage of Brown’s trial reinforced the association of events at Harper’s

Ferry with the Haitian Revolution. At the public trial of Brown, the special prosecutor for

the state of Virginia insisted on the sanity of the accused, declaring, “Brown was not a

madman.” The abolitionist’s raid was, Andrew Hunter maintained, carefully planned and

premeditated. It was part of an extensive northern abolitionist plot. The evidence was

clear. With others beside him, Brown attempted to “usurp the government, manumit our

slaves, confiscate the property of slaveholders, and without drawing a trigger or shedding

blood, permit him to take possession of the Commonwealth and make it another Hayti.”5

John Realf s testimony in front of the Senate Select Committee on the Harper’s Ferry raid

regarding Brown’s study of the Haitian Revolution removed any doubt as to Brown’s

inspiration and intent.

Seizing upon both the deep-rooted fears of slave revolt and the hysteria

surrounding Brown’s raid, southern speakers and writers began building a case for

secession. Toward this end, they put the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution

to multiple uses. Secessionists deployed the model in public addresses and printed texts

primarily as proof of a widespread abolitionist conspiracy to incite slave insurrections

throughout the South. Brown’s incursion was, they insisted, only the beginning.

4 Clement Eaton, A History of the Southern Confederacy (New York: Macmillan Company, 1954), 3. 5 Andrew Hunter, The Life, Trial, and Execution o f Captain John Brown Known as “Old Brown of Ossawatomie, ’’ With a Full Account of the Attempted Insurrection at Harper's Ferry (New York: Robert DeWitt, 1859), 93.

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Contending that there were obvious similarities between the events that preceded the

Haitian Revolution and those actions advocated by northern abolitionists, secessionists

argued that separation from the Union was the only way to insure that history, in this

case, would not repeat itself. To James D. B. De Bow, editor of the most popular

periodical in the South, northerners were synonymous with abolitionists. Both committed

numerous injustices on the South. The greatest offense was the advocacy of slave

rebellion. Abolitionists intended to bring upon the white men and women of the South a

merciless race of “predatory, sanguinary, and lustful African negroes, whose known rule

of warfare is not only an ‘undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions,’

but one of beastly appetites, blood-drinking and cannibal horrors.” History revealed no

greater wrong then “the negroes of San Domingo, when, under the encouragement of the

frenzied humanitarians of France, they rose against the white population. It was as if the

fiends of hell, drunk with demoniac instincts and impulsions, were let loose on earth. ‘ An

undistinguishable destruction o f all ages, sexes and conditions,’ was the least offence in

scenes of dreadful outrage the pen may not indite, nor tongue utter.” For years,

abolitionists had encouraged among slaves “a harvest of blood and pollution.” They

delivered their “libelous and seditious tracts” to the South’s slaves through the mail, and

as a result “stirred up several limited negro insurrections,” including the unforgettable

revolt in Southampton, Virginia. Wherever the rebel slaves of Southampton traveled that

fateful night, their trails “were marked with San Domingo scenes— an undistinguished

destruction o f all ages, sexes, and conditions. Infants, even, had been tom from their

cradles by the heels, and their brains dashed out mercilessly against the walls.” Still,

Brown’s raid was the last straw. At Harper’s Ferry, abolitionists again “unfurled the

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black banner of abolition.” With a “notorious horse-thief and murderer” in the lead they

“boldly invaded the States of Maryland and Virginia, seized upon the United States

Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, and invited the slaves throughout the South to rebellion and a

feast of blood and rapine, necessarily to terminate, if successful, in the overthrow of the

governments of the Southern States, and the extermination of their white proprietors.”6

Prominent southern writers and politicians amplified De Bow’s thinking, noting

the similarities between northern abolitionists and the radical European abolitionists of

the eighteenth century. South Carolina State Senator John Townsend warned an audience

in Charleston of the “ignominy and degradation” they faced upon submitting to northern

fanaticism. Townsend insisted that there was no difference “whether our lives and

fortunes were controlled by Red Republican France, or Black Republican Massachusetts;

whether we are to be the victims of the Pharisaical self-righteousness of Old England

philanthropy, of the Puritanical self-righteousness of New England philanthropy? France

had her Santhonox; England her Clarkson and Buxton; and the North have their

Giddings, their Wilson, their Seward, and their Sumner.” As radical abolitionism had

produced such horrific consequences elsewhere, Townsend questioned the ability of

white southerners to escape its effects. In the last decade of the eighteenth century,

French radicals took ideas of the Rights Man beyond Europe and delivered them

throughout the empire to its colonies, where they were “inapplicable.” When this

happened the colony of St. Domingo was unable to resist. It became home to

indescribable scenes of horror. The black republic was a stark reminder of the

consequences of abolition: “there she stands—a Degraded Thing—a monument of

6 “The Secession of the South,”De Bow’s Review, III (April 1860): 12-14; The magazine claimed 4,600 subscribers in 1855. “James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow,”American National Biography, 313.

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‘warning’ to all peoples, to take their government into their own hands, and not to permit

themselves to be governed by another and a hostile people!'''1

In a popular proslavery anthology published in 1860, University of Virginia

mathematics professor Albert Taylor Bledsoe offered a narrative of the Haitian

Revolution to illuminate the parallels between the origins of the Haitian Revolution and

the sectional crisis that now threatened the nation. He began, “May it never be forgotten

that the ‘Friends of the Blacks’ at Boston had their exact prototypes in 7 es Amis des

Noirs ’ of Paris.” Of the latter group, “Robespierre was the ruling spirit, and Brissot the

orator”; and “By the dark machinations of the one, and the fiery eloquence of the other,

the French people— la grande nation —were induced, in 1791, to proclaim the principle

of equality to and for the free blacks of St. Domingo.” Consequently, one of the world’s

most beautiful island’s, the “brightest and most precious jewel in the crown of France,”

became the first of the West Indian colonies in which abolitionists embarked on the

dreadful experiment of racial equality. French radicals knew of the “horrors into which it

would inevitably plunge both the whites and the blacks of the island.” Nevertheless, they

remained firm and resolute in their course. Aware that abolition might detract from the

wealth of these colonies, Robespierre, declared, “Perish the colonies rather than sacrifice

one iota of our principles!” Northern abolitionists shared these same ambitions. The

parallels were obvious. As Robespierre announced to the free blacks of St. Domingo that

they were entitled to all the rights and privileges of citizens, Seward announced the same

policy to northern free blacks, so they would propagate the same doctrines among their

brethren in the South. Like eighteenth-century Haitian slaves, American slaves “would be

7 John Townsend, The South Alone, Should Govern the South. And African Slavery Should be Controlled by Those Only, Who Are Friendly to It, 3d ed. (Charleston: Evans & Cogswell, 1860), 12-13.

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instigated, in every possible way, to claim their natural equality with the whites; and, by

every diabolical art, their passions would be inflamed.” Abolitionists were unconcerned.

Poverty, ruin, and death were small items with them. They rarely entered into their

calculations. “The dangers of a civil war—though the most fearful the world has ever

seen—lie quite beneath the range of their humanity.” Bledsoe opined, “we should expect

our argument from the consequences of emancipation to be met by a thorough-going

abolitionist with the words,— ’Perish the Southern States rather than sacrifice one iota of

our principles!’” Abolitionists forgot how Haiti’s white population “melted, like

successive flakes of snow, in the furnace of that freedom which a Robespierre had

kindled.” The lives of white southerners depended on their never forgetting.8

Southern conspiracy theorists argued that among abolitionist’s primary aims was

the elevation of a Republican candidate to the Executive Office. Secessionist John

Thrasher elucidated in a proslavery speech delivered in Port Gibson, Mississippi. He

began with a recital of the history of the French Jacobins during the French Revolution. It

was these extremists who were ultimately responsible for “the bloody scenes on St.

Domingo, the destruction of the white race, and the relapsing into barbarism of the black

race.” Their fanatical philosophy, which originated in England, then spread to the North.

Now American abolitionists sought similar results, and they would use the electoral

process and the office of the Presidency to ensure it. White southerners had no choice but

to interpret Lincoln’s election as “a declaration of war against slavery and the South.”9

8 Albert Taylor Bledsoe, “Liberty and Slavery,” in E. N. Elliott, Cottoned., is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments Comprising the Writings o f Hammon, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright on this Important Subject (Pritchard Abbot & Loomis, 1860; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 404-05,412-13. 9 John B. Thrasher,Slavery A Divine Institution. By. J.B. Thrasher, o f Port Gibson. A Speech, Made Before the Breckinridge and Lane Club, November 5th, 1860 (Port Gibson, Mississippi: Southern Reveille Book and Job Office, 1861), 5.

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Benjamin Morgan Palmer used the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church in New

Orleans to warn of the expected horrors resulting from the ascendancy of the abolitionist

party in the Presidential election of 1860. There was historical precedent, Palmer

explained. The Jacobin abolitionists of France cried out, “liberty, equality, and

fraternity,” and consequently “converted St. Domingo into a howling waste.” In the

South, these slogans would also translate as “bondage, confiscation and massacre.” Worst

of all, the election of an abolitionist president was not even the consummation of

abolitionist’s aims, but simply “the beginning of that consummation.” If history was

honest, then “there will be cohesion enough till the end of the beginning is reached, and

the dreadful banquet of slaughter and ruin shall glut the appetite.” The address resonated

with white southerners. Requests for prints of the sermon poured in, and immediately

publishers copied the sermon in newspapers and pamphlet form throughout the South.

One New Orleans publisher printed nearly 100,000 copies alone. We must consider it

among the essential documents in both the story of secession and the history of the

Confederacy. It offers a snapshot of the mental world of white southerners on the eve of

secession.10

The equation of Abraham Lincoln’s election with a repetition of the horrors of the

Flaitian Revolution was easy arithmetic for white southerners. One native South

Carolinian imagined such a scenario in Black Gauntlet, a proslavery novel written in

response to Uncle Toms ’ Cabin and published in 1860. Fictional abolitionists thought the

10 Benjamin Morgan Palmer, The South, Her Peril, and Her Duty; a Discourse, Delivered in the First Presbyterian Church, New Orleans, on Thursday, November 29, 1860 (New Orleans: True Witness and Sentinel, 1860), 8-9, 11, 13-14; Wakelyn,Southern Pamphlets on Secession, 63; The figures are provided by Wayne C. Eubank, who adds, “No other southern sermon on slavery and secession received greater acclaim or wider attention.” “Benjamin Morgan Palmer’s Thanksgiving Sermon, 1860,” in J. Jeffery Auer, ed., Antislavery and Disunion, 1858-1861: Studies in the Rhetoric of Compromise and Conflict (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1968): 308-309.

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election was the “hour of triumph.” It was instead the “hour of trial.” Before Lincoln

even assumed the presidency and took any substantive action, a massive slave

insurrection erupted and spread, “from the waters of the Chesapeake to those of

Apalachicola.” It was “sudden, desolating, and bloody . . . From Delaware to Louisiana

and Texas, the negroes, led on by the most rabidly fanatic of the abolitionists, rose up in a

secret and well-concerted plot against their masters.” No slave state avoided the horrors.

Whole families were murdered. “Fire, massacre, and barbarian cruelty and treachery,

marked every plantation; and for a season the extermination of the white race seemed

inevitable. San Domingo fiendish cruelty gloated itself with blood on the first outbreak of

this servile war.” The southern states of Mary Howard’s imagination responded swiftly to

the racial Apocalypse. Uniting “in a Southern confederacy,” they defeated the abolitionist

invaders, and “In a few months a million of negroes were put to the sword.”11

Andrew Pickens Calhoun, son of the legendary Fire-eater John C. Calhoun, spoke

of the expected effects of Lincoln’s election in more realistic terms. He predicted that the

election of an abolitionist President would damage the South irreparably. It would “place

the power of this Government—its fiscal—physical and moral force—against us, so

potentially, that a long and tumultuous struggle must ensue, before we could disentangle

the serpent—like coils that would twist themselves around the limbs of the South.” When

that happened, the South would mirror St. Domingo, where “shortly after the great and

radical revolution in France, the ideal and fanciful words, liberty, equality and fraternity,

each roseate with blood, swept over the earth, more deadly and lasting than any epidemic

that ever devastated the moral nature of man.” Calhoun argued that those three words lost

11 Mrs. Henry Rose Schoolcraft,Plantation Life: The Narratives o f Mrs. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1860), 563-64.

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meaning on Haiti, and they meant even less in the South now. “Strange to say, no three

words in any language have so little sense and meaning when submitted to analysis.” The

French arrested the impact of these words on their side of the Atlantic. “But when the

storm passed over, the wrecks of a higher civilization lay around. The negro in Hayti...

arose, with all the fury of the beast.” Such an unthinkable scene northern abolitionists

“would delight to see re-enacted now with us.”12

Comparisons of eighteenth-century French radicals and contemporary northern

abolitionists served an additional purpose besides uniting white southerners and

promoting secession, as Calhoun’s oration attests. They simultaneously buttressed white

southerner’s proslavery arguments, which relied heavily on the ideas of white racial

supremacy. Insisting that the Haitian Revolution was the result of outside agitators and

that northern abolitionists were required to launch southern slave revolts, affirmed the

proslavery belief that slaves were content, pliant, and neither worthy nor desirous of

freedom. 13 Holding abolitionists responsible for slave rebellion was a confirmation of

what slaveowners insisted was the Positive Good of slavery. A writer in the Charleston

Mercury who invoked the Haitian Revolution explained, “We believe that there is not in

the world, a more harmonious population than the white population of the Southern

12 “Annual Address of President A. P. Calhoun, delivered in the State House, before the State Agricultural Society, on Tuesday Evening, November 13, 1860,”Daily South Carolinian, 14 November 1860. 13 The proslavery press dismissed the Haitian Revolution as the product of radical abolitionism before. In 1855, for example,De Bow’s Review offered the following, in response to the popularity ofUncle Tom's Cabin: “Any one familiar with the history of Commissioner Santhonase, Abbe’ Gregore’, and Toussaint l’Ouverture, knows that the insurrection of St. Domingo is not to be attributed to the negroes, but to the instigation of French devils and mad republicans sent among them; and the Oge’ drama was got up then, as that of Uncle Toms now, to excite and heighten the prejudice of classes and sections, and to set all France against her colonies, and the north now against hersouthern colonies-, but poor Oge’, a man of life, fell, finally, the tool and victim of his own friends, while Uncle Tom, a mere creature of imagination, enjoys a sort of apotheosis. The instigators and authors, however, in both instances made money by the calamity.” “Practical Effects of Emancipation,”De Bow’s Review, May 1855.

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States.”14 Bledsoe made an analogous argument. Laying the problem of slave rebellion at

the feet of interlopers he declared, “blacks are contented in servitude.” Only with

encouragement from abolitionists, would slaves clamor for “their inalienable rights.”

“Three millions of freed blacks, thus circumstanced, would furnish the elements of the

most horrible civil war the world has ever witnessed.”

Leading southern intellectuals reconciled the violent history of the Haitian

Revolution with the supposed contentedness of American slaves. The Apostle of

Secession Edmund Ruffin, who would fire one of the first shots of the Civil War at Fort

Sumter, South Carolina, commented on the rarity of slave insurrections throughout

history in a disturbing secessionist novel published on the eve of the war.15 “Among

hundreds of slaveholding nations, and in the course of thousands of years, there have

been some insurrection of slaves, and some few servile wars, of sufficient importance to

be recorded in history,” Ruffin wrote. Of these, “the only one which was not quelled by

their masters, was the servile war of St. Domingo.” But this was not a real rebellion. It

“was both instigated and reinforced by the abolition fanaticism of the Jacobin

government of revolutionary France.” Similar outside influences threatened the South.

“Such instigation and encouragement, and, indirectly, the promise of the future aid of

armed support, are offered to our slaves by our ‘northern brethren.’ But they have a very

different people to deal with; and they will equal the emancipators of St. Domingo only

in intention and effort.”16 On the floor of the United States Senate, Jefferson Davis

14 “Slaveholders and Non-Slaveholders of the South,”Charleston Mercury. 15 Charles P. Roland, An American Iliad: The Story of the Civil War, 2d. ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002), 38. 16 The novel imagines a failed slave insurrection ignited by one of John Brown’s sons, and describes slaves yearning to remain on the plantations of their white masters. Edmund Ruffin,Anticipations o f the Future, to Serve as Lessons for the Present Time: in the Form o f Extracts o f Letters From an English Resident in the United States, to the London Times, From 1864 to 1870 (Richmond: J.W. Randolph, 1860), 395-96.

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continued this line of thinking, only one week before resigning and eventually assuming

the Presidency of the Confederate States of America. In a vituperative on northern

aggression, Davis denied slaves’ yearning for liberation. Davis explained, “Governments

have tempered with slaves; bad men have gone among the ignorant and credulous people,

and incited them to murder and arson; but—of themselves—moving by themselves—I

say history does not chronicle a case of negro insurrection.” The Haitian Revolution, “so

often referred to, and so little understood, is not a case where black heroes rose and

acquired a Government. It was a case in which the French Government, trampling upon

the rights and safety of a distant and feeble colony by sending troops among them,

brought on a revolution, first of the mulattoes, and afterwards of the blacks. Their first

army was not even able to effect this.” A second army was required. “Do you wonder,

then, that we pause when we see this studied tendency to convert the Government into a

military despotism?” White southerners remembered “the conduct of France, and that

those troops were sent with like avowal, and quartered on plantations, and planters

arrested for treason—just such charges as are made to-day against southern men—and

brought away that insurrection might be instigated among their slaves?”17

Secessionists deployed the imagery and oftentimes the words of the leading

authorities of the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution when establishing the

similarities between northern abolitionist and Les Amis des Noirs of eighteenth-century

France. These were scare tactics intended to win converts to the religion of secession. To

fully understand the fear that the proslavery narrative of the Haitian Revolution

engendered in white southerners on the eve of the Civil War, we must consider the words

17 Jefferson Davis, “Remarks on the Special Message on Affairs in South Carolina,” in Jon L. Wakelyn, ed., Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 138-39.

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of two of the most widely read authors of the Haitian Revolution, the Jamaican planter

Bryan Edwards and the famed British historian Archibald Alison. Edwards’s graphic

descriptions resonated in the United States more than a half-century after first appearing

in the 1790s.18 This was something Alison made sure of in his mammoth multi-volume

history of Europe, which he completed in 1842.19 The tome was a smashing commercial

success on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, readers purchased 100,000

copies of one edition alone.20 Alison placed great emphasis on the salience of the French

Revolution in European history, as evidence by both the book’s chronology and title; but

he had much to offer on the Haitian Revolution as well. When describing the “horrors” of

the Haitian Revolution, he borrowed and at other times blatantly inserted entire sections

of Edwards’ polemic. For generations of readers bom after the Haitian Revolution,

Alison repeated Edwards’s words to catalogue the horrors perpetrated by Haitian slaves

against white men, women, and children. Some of the language retains its power to

disturb even now: “The Negroes, like unchained tigers, precipitated themselves on their

masters, seized their arms, massacred them without pity, or threw them into the flames.”

They exercised cruelties that “exceeded anything recorded in history; The negroes

marched with spiked infants on their spears instead of colours; they sawed asunder the

male prisoners, and violated the females on the dead bodies of their husbands.”21 On the

18 Edwards’s multi-volume work was published more than a dozen times in London and New York, with the first edition appearing in London in 1793. Representative of the versions published in the United States is: An Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo: Comprehending an Account of the Revolt of the Negroes in the Year 1791, and a Detail o f the Military Transactions o f the British Army in that Island, in the Years 1793 & 1794, vol. 4, The History, Civil and Commercial, o f the British Colonies in the West Indies (Philadelphia: James Humphreys, 1806). 19 Archibald Alison, History of Europe, from the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789, to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, vols. 4 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1852). 20 “Sir Archibald Alison,”Dictionary of National Biography Volume I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917), 287-290. 21 Alison, History of Europe, vol. 2, 242.

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eve of the Civil War, secessionists littered their speeches and writings with the tropes of

Edwards and Alison, as they described slaves spiking white infants on stakes, sawing

white prisoners in half, and raping white women on the bodies of their dead husbands. 22

The resonance of the sublime tropes employed by Bryan Edwards and Archibald Alison

among secessionists on the eve of the Civil War testifies to the existence of a transatlantic

proslavery literary culture. It furthermore illuminates the survival of a racialized culture

of fear, which transcended both time and space.

Reviving the public memory of the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian

Revolution served another purpose, in addition to legitimating secession and defending

the institution slavery—what Alexander Stephens called the “cornerstone” of the South.

Fears of a Second Haitian Revolution had the effect of unifying whites from different

geographic regions and of varying economic circumstances, thus removing one of the

greatest obstacles to building a southern nation. A New Orleans editorialist who

understood some of the cultural and economic differences among “slaveholding

communities,” entreated the border states to secede with the states of the lower South.

There were, he maintained, few other choices available. The border states could “make

themselves a powerless appendage to Northern territory.” On the fringe of an abolitionist

skirt, however, they would befriend neither North nor South. In this no-man’s land, the

future was bleak. Caught between to millstones, they would eventually “be ground into

atoms.” It was in their best interest now “to contemplate the fate of St. Domingo . . . as

22 For example, see: Bledsoe, “Liberty and Slavery,” 405. 23 Alexander H. Stephens, “Cornerstone Address,” in Wakelyn,Southern Pamphlets on Secession, 402-12. Increasingly, historians of the South agree that slavery was the bedrock of the Confederacy: Avery O. Craven, The Growth o f Southern Nationalism: 1848-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953); John McCardell, The Idea o f a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830-1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); Emory Thomas,The Confederate Nation 1861-1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

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prophetic of their own.”24 A writer in Louisville, Kentucky who advocated secession

expressed his solidarity with the wealthier cotton states to the South. There was no end in

sight to the war against slavery now developing in the North. It was only a matter of time

when wherever slavery existed, attachment to the Union would mean “a war of life and

death, sooner or later terminating in a repetition of all the horrors of St. Domingo, at one

fell swoop making the rich and prosperous States whose exports constitute the wealth of

the nation an uninhabited and habitless desert!” With the destruction of the South’s

wealthiest states, the fate of the poorer ones was sealed.25

The Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution served to unite white

southerners of varying economic classes as much as it did various regions and states. In

an essay arguing the interest of non-slaveholders in slavery, James D. B. De Bow

reminded readers of the effect of abolition on poor whites, “of which class, I was myself

until very recently a member.” It was essential that non-slaveholders especially remember

the Haitian Revolution, for on Haiti the lowest class white man was “massacred equally

with the rich.”26 Mississippi’s former Governor and United States Senator Albert G.

Brown insisted that a violent revolution over slavery threatened all whites, even those

who did not own slaves. If secession failed, the rich would flee the country leaving those

unable to own slaves fending for themselves. Then “The Negro will intrude into his

preserve . .. insist on being treated as an equal.” He would then “go to the white man’s

bed, and the white man his.” Subsequent to this, his son would “marry the white man’s

daughter, and the white man’s daughter his son.” Ultimately, the former slaves would

24 “The Border Slave States and Their Slaves,”The Daily Delta, in Dwight Lowell Dumond, ed., Southern Editorials on Secession (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1964), 432 25 “The Position o f the Cotton States,”Daily Courier, in Dumond, Southern Editorials on Secession, 360. 26 James D. B. De Bow,The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder. The Right of Peaceful Secession. The Character and Influence of Abolitionism (Charleston: Evans & Cogswsell, 1860), 10, 12.

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demand and receive equality. “Then will commence a war of races such as has marked

the history of San Domingo.”27 A writer in the Charleston Mercury felt that “It is the

error of all northern Abolitionists—that there is an antagonism between the slaveholders

and the non-slaveholders of the South:—that hatred and hostility, with a desire to liberate

the negroes, and not confidence and respect, exists between them.” It was incumbent on

non-slaveholders to remember the Haitian Revolution: “Where are the white non

slaveholders of Hayti? Slaughtered or driven out of that grand paradise of Abolitionism.”

What would come of the South if it remained in the Union? Once more, the wealthiest

would abandon the country. “None will remain, but those who are unable to leave it, or

who do not realize the fearful terrors of their condition.” A conflict would arise between

the former slaves and those white southerners who remained, “compared with which, the

atrocities and crimes of ordinary wars, are peace itself. The midnight glare of the

incendiary torch, will illuminate the country from one end to another; while pillage,

violence, murder, poisons and rape will fill the air with demoniac revelry.” The fear of

such a situation realizing was something Americans beyond the boundaries of the slave

states “cannot, or will not, understand.” The writer ended with an affirmation of white

racial solidarity and southern nationalism, declaring slaveowners and non-slaveowners

“one in sympathy, interest, and feelings. They have equal rights and privileges—one fate.

They will stand together in defence of their liberties and institutions, and will yet exist at

the South a powerful and prosperous confederation of commonwealths, controlling the

welfare and destiny of other nations, but controlled by none.”28

27 Avery Craven, “Coming of the War Between the States, an Interpretation,”Journal o f Southern History 2, no. 3 (August 1936), 322. 28 “Slaveholders and Non-Slaveholders of the South,”Charleston Mercury.

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The passage suggests the final use to which secessionists put the memory of the

Haitian Revolution. Whether warning whites of a Black Republican conspiracy, or

reminding them of the horrors that were sure to follow if such an insurrection took place,

secessionists used the memory of the “horrors of St. Domingo” to, above all else, argue

the necessity of the creation of a new nation. A confederation of slave states was the only

guarantee of avoiding a Second Haitian Revolution.29 A writer in De Bow’s Review

calling himself “Python” wrote thusly: “there is but one sure mode of escape, and but one

position of safety for the South, and these are, Secession and a new Confederation .”

While Northerners used the Constitution as a vehicle for the destruction of the South,

southerners sat by passively and observed. They took no action. Their refusal to act

meant “a civil and servile insurrection, the devastation of their country, the slaughter of

their wives and children, the unspeakable horrors of another San Domingo.” Secession

was a matter of “LIFE AND DEATH.”30 William Henry Holcombe, a medical doctor

who traced his bloodlines to a soldier in the American Revolution, argued that the drift of

the United States towards abolitionism meant the ruin of the South. The alternative to

building a separate nationality, a “slave-holding republic,” was the Africanization of the

South. Fortunately, he avowed, “St. Domingo is before us with its bloody teachings.”31

Andrew Calhoun maintained that secession would remove any desire among slaves for

freedom, and thus eliminate all possibilities of a Second Haitian Revolution. “The action

of the South with promptness will dispel this idea and reduce the negro to unconditional

29 This assertion challenges historian David Potter’s claim that secession preceded southern nationalism: “The Civil War did far more to produce southern nationalism which flourished in the cult of the Lost Cause than southern nationalism did to produce the war.”The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 469. 30 “The Secession of the South,” 2, 15. 31 William Henry Holcombe, “The Alternative: A Separate Nationality, or the Africanization of the South,” Southern Literary Messenger 32, no. 2 (February 1861): 81-82, 85, 88.

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quiet and submission, if the disentanglement from the North is complete, thorough and

radical. . . The only haven of security to the South must now be entered through a

dissolution of the Union. T9 Benjamin Morgan Palmer warned of the likely results should

the state of Louisiana refuse secession: “We may, for a generation, enjoy comparative

ease, gather up our feet in our beds, and die in peace. But our children will go forth

beggared from the homes of their fathers. Sapped, circumvented, undermined, the

institutions of your soil will be overthrown; and within five and twenty years, the history

of St. Domingo will be the record of Louisiana.” The choice was clear. “If dead men’s

bones can tremble, ours will move under the muttered curses of sons and daughters . ..

Under a full conviction that the salvation of the whole country is depending upon the

action of the South, I am impelled to deepen the sentiment of resistance in the Southern

mind, and to strengthen the current now flowing towards a union of the South.”33 John

Townsend wondered if the South would “remain a passive victim, and, like the timid

sheep, allow itself to be bound whilst the butcher is preparing the knife for its destruction;

or will she not rather throw off, at once, her degrading sloth and cowardice, and,

summoning up her ample powers, throw off a government which is about to be taken

possession of by her deadly enemies?”34 Disunion was the only alternative. For those still

harboring attachment to the Union, Townsend expressed a sense of urgency: “Fortunately

for the South, history has recorded for our warning the fatal consequences of such folly.

Contemplate, I beseech you, fellow citizens, the example of St. Domingo.”35

32 “Annual Address of President A. P. Calhoun.” 33 Palmer, The South: Her Peril, and her Duty, 16. 34 John Townsend, The Doom o f Slavery in the Union: Its Safety Out of Second It Edition (Charleston: Evans & Cogswell, 1860), 4. 35 Townsend, The South Alone, Should Govern the South, 12.

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When Secession Commissioners invoked the Haitian Revolution in the

conventions that offered southern states the opportunity to vote on secession, it was clear

how important the public memory of the Haitian Revolution had become to both the

secessionist movement and the making of the Confederacy. William Cooper addressed

the Missouri State legislature in an attempt to convince the voters of this pivotal border

state of the necessity of secession: “Under the policy of the Republican party, the time

would arrive when the scenes of San Domingo and Hayti, with all their attendant horrors,

would be enacted in the slaveholding States.”36 In Virginia, the Georgia Supreme Court

Justice Henry L. Benning cited the Haitian Revolution as proof of the impending doom

should the Republican Party gain political ascendancy. “We will be overpowered and our

men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth; and as for our

women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination.”37 Alabama

Commissioner Stephen Hale, in a speech Charles Dew calls “required reading for anyone

trying to understand the radical mind-set gripping the lower South on the eve of the Civil

War,” interpreted Lincoln’s election as “a solemn declaration, on the part of a great

majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property, and her

institutions; nothing less than an open declaration of war.”38 The philosophy of the

Republican party, “this new theory of government,” he argued, would lead inevitably to

the destruction of southern property, “lay waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors

of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations and her

36 Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 57. 37 Dew, Apostles of Disunion, 67. 38 Dew, Apostles of Disunion, 55.

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wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized

Africans.”39

The secession crisis that followed John Brown’s raid sparked an outpouring of

oral and print culture throughout the South. We could argue that the speeches, pamphlets,

and articles in which whites exposed their fears of a Second Haitian Revolution were

simply droplets in a tidal wave of words that southerners used to debate secession. From

the vantage point of nearly a century-and-a-half, we could also dismiss these fears as the

trivial ramblings of sectional demagogues, political extremists with vivid imaginations

and political axes to grind. However, there is evidence to suggest that there was good

reason for white southerners to treat these alarms with the greatest of consequence. Proof

abound that the makings of a Second Haitian Revolution were already afoot. A year after

Brown’s raid, a Grand Jury in Petersburg, Virginia indicted a man for inciting slaves to

revolt. A local paper reported that the evidence against the man named Dodson was

damning. Witnesses overheard him “tell the negroes in their cabin at a late hour of the

night, ‘that the children of Israel were in greater bondage than they, (i.e. the negroes) and

that they threw off the yoke of Slavery by themselves; that the negroes of St. Domingo

had overpowered their masters and set themselves free, and if they (the negroes of

Virginia) would only be determined and show that they were in earnest, the North would

send them help.” Dodson believed that as many as five hundred men in the vicinity would

provide assistance. Many others would do nothing to stop them. He was certain that “in a

short time they could all be free.”40

39 OR, Series 4, vol. I: 4-7. 40 “Charged With Inciting Rebellion,”New York Times, 6 November 1860.

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Just a few months following Dodson’s arrest, reports surfaced that northern

Abolitionists were conspiring with free blacks in the North and Canada to launch a

military invasion of the South, with the assistance of Haitian revolutionaries. A writer

quoting an unnamed source reported that James Redpath, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit

Smith, and John Brown, Jr., were at the center of the plot. The men traveled to Canada

and Haiti in search of black recruits. Redpath’s well-advertised sojourn to Haiti to

promote colonization was a ruse. His real purpose for visiting the black republic was to

obtain assistance from President Geffrard for the “daring scheme.” An abolitionist army

numbering in the thousands was to arrive from Haiti on the coast of Georgia or Florida.

Here they would “strike the slave line, with their colored cohorts, somewhere in the

neighborhood of the Mississippi, march in a body and directly for the Gulf, through the

portions of the South most thickly populated with slaves, stir up insurrections among

these as they go, force or induce slaves to join them, pillage, plunder, murder, and

bum,—leaving their track as desolate as the desert, and black with ruin.”41

Based on reports such as these and what we know about white fears of slave

rebellion throughout the antebellum period, the reaction of white southerners to John

41 “The Designs of Redpath, John Brown, Jr., Fred. Douglass, & c.,”Liberator, 15 March 1861. The conspiracy seems more real when we read the following, which appeared in a number of abolitionist papers: “Let the Government send a strong force at once, into Eastern Virginia, accompanied by such chaplains as Sella Martin, Fred. Douglass and Box Brown, with as many black volunteers as can be raised in Canada and the Free States; declare martial law . . . and declare freedom to every slave that will join the Federal Army, furnishing arms and ammunition at the same time. By prompt action of this sort, an army of 40,000 men may be raised from the slaves and the free negroes cast of the Blue Ridge, that would take care of Norfolk and Richmond, before the return of the sickly season. If this measure is not pursued, the negroes will probably cut the throats of half the whites in Eastern Virginia, before we can get control of their movements. Whoever would learn what to expect in Virginia, should read the history of the St. Domingo warfare. There was no discontent among the negroes of St. Domingo; they were docile, quiet, industrious and submissive, as any slaves can be; and on the whole, were better treated than the slaves in the United States . . . the negroes sprang to arms, and proved themselves incarnate fiends in the indiscriminate slaughter of the whites, from youth to hoary age; the infant in its cradle, and the gentle mother and mistress, sharing the fate of the most detested observer.” “What to do with Virginia,”Weekly Anglo-African, May4 1861.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Brown’s raid was logical. However, the extent to which the Apocalyptical Model of the

Haitian Revolution simultaneously experienced a revival in the North requires greater

explanation. While in the nineteenth century many white northerners shared in the white

supremacist ideology of their white neighbors to the south, they had little to fear from

slave rebellion. Nonetheless, in the aftermath of John Brown’s raid, northern Democrats

similarly revived the public memory of the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian

Revolution. Armed with pens, podiums, and printing presses, they launched an all-out

verbal and textual war on the radical abolitionist movement in an effort to keep the Union

intact and avert civil war. Ironically, in their efforts to stave off secession they

demonstrated their sympathy for, and racial identification with the white men and women

of the South, a people who lived profoundly different lives, surrounded by slaves and

burdened with the never-ending threat of slave insurrection.42

John Brown’s raid sparked the revival of public memory of the Apocalyptical

Model of the Haitian Revolution throughout the North just as it had done in the South. In

December 1859 in Boston, it brought out of retirement Edward Everett, the aging

politician and orator who delivered an address in support of the Union before an

overflowing crowd inside historic Faneuil Hall, at the institutional epicenter of radical

abolitionism. Everett explained to his audience the motivation behind his return to public

life. “The war of words—of the press, of the platform, of the State legislatures, and, must

I add, the pulpit,” had brought the nation to the brink of disaster. He saw on the horizon a

“convulsion, which will shake the Union to its foundation; and that a few more steps

42 This seems to affirm the findings of historians who find the North and South to be quite similar at mid century: Edward L. Ayers,In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003); Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Edward Pessen, “How Different From Each Other Where the Antebellum North and South?”American Historical Review 85, 5 (December 1980): 1119-49.

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forward in the direction in which affairs have moved for a few years past, will bring us to

the catastrophe.” Northern sympathy for John Brown infuriated Everett, who urged his

audience to empathize with the intended victims of Brown’s attack. “Suppose a party of

desperate, misguided men, under a resolved and fearless leader, had been organized in

Virginia, to come and establish themselves by stealth in Springfield in this State . . . to

stir up a social revolution.” What if, Everett asked, “pikes and rifles to arm twenty-five

hundred men had been procured by funds raised by extensive subscriptions throughout

the South?” He then lashed out at those in the North who found in Brown altruistic

motives. As Brown was an insane man who spent years plotting a southern slave

insurrection, “To talk of the pikes and rifles not being intended for offensive purposes”

was outrageous. An eminent historian, Everett employed history to detail the ultimate

purpose of abolitionists like Brown. The attack on Harper’s Ferry was nothing less “to do

on a vast scale what was done in St. Domingo in 1791.” To underscore this assertion,

Everett invoked Bryan Edwards, asking, “Allow me to read you a few sentences from the

historian of these events.” He then deployed the trope of infants impaled on stakes and of

the indescribability of the horrors perpetrated by Haitian slaves: “the conflagrations,

which were visible in a thousand different quarters, furnished a prospect more shocking,

and reflections more dismal than fancy can paint, or the powers of man describe.” Everett

described for his audience the people for whom Brown intended to “extend the awful

calamity, which turned St. Domingo into a heap of bloody ashes.” They were good

Americans “of education and culture—of moral and religious lives and characters—

virtuous fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters, persons who would adom any station of

society, in any country—men who read the same Bible that we do, and in the name of the

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same master, kneel at the throne of the same God—forming a class of men from which

have gone forth some of the greatest and purest characters which adom our history—

Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Marshall.” These were the men and women

“for whose bosoms pikes and rifles are manufactured in New England, to be placed in the

hands of an ignorant and subject race, supposed, most wrongfully, as recent events have

shown, to be waiting only for an opportunity to use them!” Though a northerner in

support of Union, when pondering the horrors of slave insurrection in the South,

Everett’s sympathies transcended section.43

He was not alone. In New Jersey, the venerable Commodore Stockton, scion of

one of the nation’s most prominent and influential families, a grandson to one of the

signers of the Declaration of Independence, condemned the radicalism of the Republican

Party. In a letter published in the Democratic New York Times, Stockton demanded that

northerners reject the abolitionist doctrines of the Republican Party. This, he argued, was

a party at the mercy of a radical faction, which pulled members “from one stage of

excitement to another, ‘until it has reached that point in which a further advance must be

over the broken and dismembered fragments of a once glorious Union.’” Pondering what

a shattered Union might look like if Republicanism prevailed, the ex-soldier and war hero

drew a picture of the evils that endangered the South. “The horrors of a St. Domingo

tragedy threaten to make desolate their homes; to drench their peaceful plains with

blood—to light up their midnight skies with the conflagration of their cities and

plantation villages, and to convert their faithful and contented domestics into incarnate

fiends, inviting (after rivers of blood have flowed) their own extermination.” Wanting

43 The Union and the Constitution. Public Meeting in Faneuil Hall, Boston, Dec. 8, 1859. Speeches o f Hon. Levi Lincoln, Hon. Edward Everett, Hon. Caleb Cushing, and letter o f Ex-President Pierce (Boston, 1859).

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none of this, Stockton declared his solidarity with the white men and women of the

South: “I, for one, will stand by them as a friend . . . I will stand by them because they are

right.”44

Democrats reinforced the arguments emanating from the South that a Black

Republican Conspiracy existed to prompt a Second Haitian Revolution. A writer in the

Herald affirmed that white southerners were rightfully alarmed at the prospect of slave

rebellion because of outsiders. The philosophies and teachings of northern abolitionists

were “identical with those of the infamous ‘friends of the blacks’ in the French National

Assembly in 1790,” who instigated the slaves of “St. Domingo to the revolution,

massacre and ruin that swept that fair island from the family of civilized nations.” The

threat was real, and “Against such a fate the South must unite.”45 New York’s fiery

mayor Fernando Wood received great applause from a crowd at a Democratic National

Committee convention in Syracuse, when giving a speech that emphasized the

importance of Union. Like Stockton, the mayor left no doubt as to the people he held

responsible for the sectional crisis. Abolition, he maintained, was the uncompromisable

position of the Republican Party, and there was no limit to what the party would do to

reach this wicked objective. Republicans threatened “to hang those who dissent at the

North, and to compel the South to submit by force.” When this happened, “The horrors of

St. Domingo are to be reenacted. Rapine and massacre incited, encouraged and protected

by Northern fanaticism, are to be the instruments by which thesephilanthropic results are

to be obtained.” Wood drew comparisons between French and American abolitionists.

“How singularly the present attitude of this question and of this country rehearses what

44 “The National Crisis. Further Illustrations of Popular Sentiment,”New York Times, 26 January 1860. 45 “The New Abolition Developments in Congress—Their Danger to the North,”New York Herald, 29 March 1860.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. existed in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century between the Island of St. Domingo and

its Home Government of France. For ten years preceding the massacre at St. Domingo, in

1790, an Abolitionist Party existed in France, based upon the same principles, advocating

the same doctrines, as applied to negro servitude in the French Colonies, including St.

Domingo, maintaining the same theories as those enunciated by the Black Republican

Party of to-day.” Wood invoked Wendell Phillips’s oration on Toussaint as proof of

abolitionists’ intention of bringing an Apocalyptical race war down upon the South, and

demanded that Democrats reinvent themselves as a national party that was committed to

maintaining the United States at all cost. On the issue of Union, there was no

compromise.46

Northern Democrat Louis Schade produced one of the remarkable documents of

the pre-Civil War era to win support for the Union. In what was the first book-length

proslavery narrative of the Haitian Revolution published in the South in more than a half-

century, Schade wrote of the “Horrors of St. Domingo” so that northerners would learn

from history. He began by reprinting portions of Everett’s speech, and throughout quoted

Edwards at length, including his most explicit descriptions. On Haiti, “Young women of

all ranks were first violated by a whole troop of barbarians, and then generally put to

death. Some of them were indeed reserved for the further gratification of the lust of the

savages, and others had their eyes scooped out with a knife.” One woman was far

advanced in pregnancy. “The monsters, whose prisoner she was, having first murdered

her husband in her presence, ripped her up alive, and threw the infant to the hogs. They

46 “The Syracuse Convention,”New York Times, 8 February 1860.

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then (how shall I relate it?) sewed up the head of the murdered husband in—!! !”47 Schade

promised a repetition of these horrors if the Union collapsed. “Are the people of the

United States prepared for such horrid scenes of devastation, atrocities, and bloodshed, in

their midst?” Like a southern secessionists, he found obvious parallels between

abolitionists in the North and those in France in the eighteenth century. “The rebellion of

the negroes in St. Domingo, and the insurrection of the mulattoes, were caused by the

very same means and agencies which are now employed by our Northern fanatics, and

the Republican party in general, against the Southern States.” Schade insisted Americans

read “the bloody history” of the Haitian Revolution. Men such as John Brown and

Wendell Phillips preached treason, and they “would glory, if they could incite slaughter,

rapine, and destruction, as occurred in St. Domingo.” It was up to those who did not

subscribe to these fanatical ideas, “the honest, patriotic masses,” to save the Union.48

The northern revival of public memory of the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian

Revolution reached a crescendo when the New York Herald devoted numerous columns

on its front and interior pages to the history of slavery insurrections. The paper set out to

“give a true idea of the brutal character of the negro race when they rise against their

superiors,” making it clear that if another John Brown was successful, the result “would

be but blood, blood, blood, and the utter annihilation of that very race for whose freedom

they are for a variety of motives contending.” Included were discussions of various well-

known insurrections in both the United States and West Indies; yet, the paper devoted

much of its discussion to St. Domingo. The colony was theatre to recurring slave plots

47 Louis Schade, A Book for the “Impending Crisis "! Appeal to the Common Sense and Patriotism of the People of the United States. “Helperism "Annihilated! The “Irrepressible Conflict” and its Consequences! (Washington, D.C.: Little, Morris, & Co., 1860), 6, 29, 33. 48 Schade, Book for the “Impending Crisis 7, ”, 30, 58, 60.

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and insurrections, from the first recorded revolt in the sixteenth century, “to those which

have occurred within our own recollection.” The paper used Edwards to drill home the

horrors of slave rebellion. Shortly after the initial outbreak of slaves in August 1791, “the

country was wrapped in flames and every white person, without distinction of sex or age,

was brutally massacred. Prisoners taken in battle were put to death with such studied

tortures as cannot be named without a thrill of horror. They tore them with red hot

pincers—sawed them asunder between planks—roasted them by a slow fire, or tore out

their eyes with red hot cork screws.” The paper illuminated the Haitian Revolution’s

impact on American slave resistance, and reviewed the case of Denmark Vesey as

evidence of the capability of southern slaves to produce a Second Haitian Revolution.

Citing court documents familiar to historians today, the paper remarked that Vesey was

the mastermind behind the planned insurrection. He was “a free negro of superior

abilities, who had stated to another negro that they (the blacks) were fully able to conquer

the whites if they were only unanimous and courageous as the St. Domingo people were.”

Vesey planned to set mills and houses on fire and murder the white men who ran to

safety. “When he was told that it was cruel to kill the women and children, he answered

that it was for their own safety to do so, and not to spare one white skin, for this was they

plan they pursued in St. Domingo. In fact they seemed to have decided on adopting the

same fiendish and bloody course that marked the progress of the revolution in that

island.” The similarities did not end there. “The design of Vesey was to induce the slaves

in the country parts to co-operate with those in the city, and then, after a general

massacre o f the unsuspecting inhabitants, to take possession o f the forts and ships, to kill

all on board o f the latter except the captains, and then, having plundered the banks and

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the stores, to set sail for St. Domingo .” The obvious conclusion to be drawn was that if

abolitionism prevailed, “it would result in a war of annihilation, which would present

scenes the most revolting and terrific that the imagination can picture.” The South would

be home to a Second Haitian Revolution if sensible northerners allowed radical

abolitionists to have their way.49

On the eve of the Civil War, the number of northerners unconverted to

abolitionism remained large. In public orations, pamphlets, and newspapers, Democrats

used the Haitian Revolution to warn of the revolutionary implications of the increasingly

radical abolitionist movement. Abolitionists wanted, they insisted, not only disunion, but

race war. Affirming simultaneously their racial solidarity with white southerners and their

antipathy towards enslaved African Americans, they deployed the Apocalyptical Model

of the Haitian Revolution to remind the people of the consequences of slave rebellion.

The “horrors of St. Domingo” served as a touchstone of a national Union that needed to

withstand the pressures brought to bear on it by a powerful and determined group of

abolitionist extremists. Democrats wanted both peace and Union, and they refused to

sacrifice either on the altar of slavery. One northern writer with no particular affinity for

slavery put it best, when on the eve of the Civil War he commented on the future of the

institution in America. It was inevitable that slavery would die; yet, “It is not for us, I

think, to hasten that time by revolution and servile insurrection, to put torches and pikes

into the hands of such a population to be used against the whites, in re-enacting all the

horrors of a St. Domingo massacre.”50

49 “History of Negro Insurrections,”New York Herald, 6 January 1860. 50 James Loring Baker,Slavery (Philadelphia: John A. Norton, 1860), 15.

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“MEN OF COLOR, TO ARMS!”:

DEBATING BLACK SOLDIERS

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“WILL THE BLACKS FIGHT?”: HISTORY, HAITI, AND THE

ARGUMENT FOR BLACK SOLDIERS

The northern revival of American memory of the Haitian Revolution continued

apace in the opening years of the Civil War. The debate over secession and John Brown’s

raid sparked this resurgence in the 1850s, but now the catalyst was an issue that few

pondered or even considered a possibility prior to the war—the arming of black men. As

Americans realized that the war would be neither quick nor easy, and both Union and

Confederate armies began drafting men to fill up their thinning ranks, a growing

contingent of northern free blacks and their radical white allies called on Lincoln and the

federal government to put uniforms on the backs, and muskets in the hands, of African

Americans. Conversations on violent abolitionism and secession did not splinter neatly

along geographically sectional lines, and neither did the debate over arming black

soldiers. Complicating our examination of the culture war that developed during the Civil

War over the history and memory of the Haitian Revolution as a result of the debate over

arming black soldiers, is the fact that northerners and southerners were not divided neatly

along sectional lines. Regardless of section, in the middle of the nineteenth century

ordinary white Americans bristled at the idea of armed and uniformed black men

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marching south to do battle with other white men. Opposition to black soldiers was in

fact one of the things that whites on both sides of the Mason and Dixon line agreed on.

Nonetheless, a small yet determined group of abolitionists ultimately convinced the North

and the federal government of both the necessity and potential benefits of the extreme

measure.

This chapter explores the ways abolitionists used the Haitian Revolution to justify

and eventually achieve the radical policy of arming black soldiers. The extent to which

this cadre of men and women of varying complexions utilized this landmark moment in

African American history to affect public policy suggests something took place

additionally. When abolitionists deployed the Haitian Revolution in public orations,

books, newspapers, and periodicals, they sought more than just the authority to put

weapons in the hands of black men. By insisting on the relevance of African Americans

and their history to the Civil War, they laid the foundation of a new United States, a free

and equal society, which outlawed slavery and accepted African Americans as citizens.

Toussaint’s prominent place in northern oral and print culture during the Civil War

signaled a transition in northern constructions of race and nation. In oral and print culture,

abolitionists increasingly deployed the narrative of the Haitian Revolution that for more

than a half-century told of a vigilant, disciplined, and well-trained black army under the

guidance and direction of Toussaint. By offering the Heroic Model of the Haitian

Revolution and the concomitant images of black valor, militancy, and courage it

provided, they sought to erase from northern minds the image of docile, child-like slaves.

They insisted that by arming slaves, the ranks of the federal army would swell with

motivated, disciplined, and patriotic black men who yearned to spill their blood in the

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twin causes of freedom and nation. At the same time, they attempted to ease whites’ fears

of an uncontrollable and vengeful black army by invoking Toussaint.1

The speeches and writings of abolitionists during the Civil War belie the assertion

by Michael Kammen that before the 1870s, Americans made little use of history.

Radical abolitionists displayed a great faith in the power of history to inform present

events when they appropriated the memory of the Haitian Revolution. The New York

Evening Post copied on its front page a letter to the editor in which the author, most

likely the New England minister and abolitionist John Weiss, employed the methodology

of a skilled and practiced historian to answer the question, “Will the Blacks Fight?”

Citing the published memoirs of a French soldier who fought against Toussaint on the

battlefield, Weiss testified to the authenticity of the narrative of Pamphile LaCroix. “His

‘Memoires’ are considered valuable, especially for their details of military operations.” In

the Haitian Revolution, blacks fought admirably, even in the early days of the revolt.

1 Immediately after the firing on Fort Sumter, free blacks and their white allies organized militias, published resolutions, and flooded the mailboxes of newspaper editors, Congressmen, and the President offering their services to the United States military. A few light-skinned volunteers managed to avoid detection and enlist in all-white regiments, though the army immediately ousted those they discovered, including the future historian Joseph T. Wilson. African Americans served honorably in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and Indian wars, but Lincoln rejected their overtures and in general took a decidedly conservative stance toward the issue of slavery, going so far as to order his officers to return all fugitive slaves to their masters. Lincoln’s actions are not surprising, for he, like most whites, agreed that blacks were of an inferior race. White Americans questioned whether blacks had either the ability or will to fight. Lincoln especially doubted the soundness of a policy of arming black soldiers, fearing that if they were armed, “in a few weeks the arms would be in the hands of the rebels.” It was an inauspicious beginning for the black soldier, and for the advocates of arming black soldiers, there was little they could do. Issuing weapons to free blacks in the North and fugitive slaves in the South was anathema to white Americans. Convincing Lincoln and the War Department to arm black men required an aggressive campaign, one that calmed whites’ fears of black incompetence and timidity. The movement also had to convince them that slaves were not obsessed with ideas of retribution and revenge. Thomas Truxton Moebs, Black Soldiers—Black Sailors—Black Ink: Research Guide on African-Americans in U.S. Military History, 1526-1900 (Moebs Publishing Company: Chesapeake Bay and Paris, 1994), 383. Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works o f Abraham Lincoln vols.,(9 New Brunswick, New Jersey: 1955, V, 423. 2 Discussing Americans ’ use of history before 1870, Kammen writes: “Some history books were written, published, even purchased, to be sure. But public policy was infrequently discussed within any sort of historical context. Americans were much more likely to allude to theburden of the past than to possible uses of the past.”Mystic Chords, 35.

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They were particularly adept at fighting defensively, as opposed to offensively. Given the

chance of fighting for their own liberty, American slaves could be expected to perform

equally. “The history of Hayti shows that the black will fight.”3 A New England writer

responded to the same question with the following: “There is no instance, that we

remember, of regular and protracted warfare between negroes and whites, save in the

island of Hayti. We shall not now discuss the political aspects of the Haytien

Revolutions, but barely examine them, to discover what light they shed on the question

which has been raised.” History showed that on Haiti, “The negroes manifested fortitude,

courage and enthusiasm through the long war. They were intrepid in attack, steady and

unflinching when assailed.” They took on the best troops in the world and proved

themselves worthy adversaries. “The history of the Haytien Revolution is positive proof

that negroes have made good soldiers.”4 Prominent Philadelphia minister Jonathan Gibbs

preached the loyalty and patriotism of African Americans, and called on the federal

government to arm black men in order to fulfill the destiny of the American people.

Insisting on the manhood of black men, Gibbs recalled the instances where African

Americans fought. He then invoked the words of David Walker: “What has made the

name of Haiti a terror to tyrants and slaveholders throughout the world, but the terrible

fourteen years’ fight of black men against some of the best troops of Napoleon—and the

3 It is impossible to determine the number of people who read Weiss’s letter. Its reprinting in popular newspapers across the North and then in pamphlet form suggests its reach: “Will the Blacks Fight?”New York Evening Post, July 10, 1862;National Anti-Slavery Standard, 19 July 1862;Chicago Tribune, 15 July 1863; Another indication of the article’s impact on northern culture and possibly even public policy arises when we learn that copies of the article are found today in the collections of Wendell Phillips and Abraham Lincoln. “Will the Blacks Fights?,” Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; Wendell Phillips Papers, Harvard University. 4 “Negroes for Soldiers,”Burlington Times (Vermont), in Liberator, 24 January 1862.

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black man wiped them out. There are some fights that the world will never forget, and

among them is the fight of black men for liberty on the Island of Haiti.”5

Abolitionists used the Haitian Revolution to argue for black soldiery in some of

the most popular newspapers and periodicals in the United States. In an item published in

multiple print media in the first months of the war, The Lesson o f St. Domingo: How to

make the War Short and the Peace Righteous, Elizur Wright testified to the importance of

history. The radical abolitionist encouraged all Americans to remember Haiti’s

revolutionary history, as it was the only event on record “parallel to our own present

crisis.” Wright explained that given the rebellion of the Confederacy now under way,

“the teachings of history are unspeakably important to our government at this moment.”

He summoned the memory of St. Domingo so that his country would not fail to deal with

slaves as the rulers of the French colony had done a half a century earlier, writing, “The

pride and prejudice of race and color may be great luxuries, but St. Domingo can teach us

what they cost.” Wright drew an analogy between the black man’s record in St. Domingo

and his potential to fight in the United States. Referring to African Americans as “as raw

military power,” he asked, “What is the lesson of this history? . .. Though the black

material may be very raw, under proper guidance, it may soon be made effective.”6

Wright’s piece attracted numerous responses, including one from a soldier in the Haitian

Army. “The History of Hayti, so replete with useful instruction to countries wherein

slavery still protracts its ‘horrors,’ is, unhappily,” wrote A. Tate, “too little known by

Americans.” The parallels between the condition of the United States and those on Saint

5 Jonathan C. Gibbs, “Freedom’s Joyful Day,” in Philip Foner, ed.,The Voice o f Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes in the United States, 1797-1973 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1975): 263-65. 6 Elizur Wright, The Lesson o f St. Domingo: How to Make the War Short and the Peace Righteous (Boston: A. Williams and Co., 1861), 3-4, 18; The text was reprinted in the following:New York Tribune, 27 May 1861;Douglass Monthly, August 1861;and Liberator, 19 July 1863.

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Domingue before the revolution were undeniable. The lesson Wright learned from the

history of the Haitian Revolution was vital to the American republic: “You that have

read, reflect! for, in history, as in physics, like causes produce like effects.”7

The decision of the editors of one of the most recognized periodicals of the

nineteenth century to serialize a lengthy article on the history of the Haitian Revolution

indicates the rising status of the Haitian Revolution, which coincided with the debate over

black soldiers. In “The Horrors of San Domingo,” which appeared in the Atlantic

Monthly, John Weiss played on the trope made familiar by paranoid slaveowners. The

article is especially instructing, as Weiss understood and expounded on the power of

memory. “In the two decades between 1840 and 1860 the American Union was seldom

saved by a Northern statesman without the help of San Domingo.” Antislavery

northerners and proslavery southerners were the combatants in a longstanding history

war. “Southern men of intelligence had the best of reasons for understanding the

phenomena of San Domingo, and while the ‘Friends of the Black’ were dripping with the

innocent French blood in Northern speeches, the embryo Secessionists at Nashville and

Savannah strengthened their convictions with the proper rendering of the same history.”

Weiss recognized the centrality of the public memory of the Haitian Revolution to the

decades-old sectional crisis. “San Domingo was helping to destroy the Union at the South

while it was trying to save it at the North.” There was only one possible outcome.

“Slavery will continue to be the great unimpaired war power of Southern institutions, till

some color-bearer, white or black, in the name of law and order, shakes the stars of

America over her inland fields.” According to Weiss, the horrors of St. Domingo were

the brutal and bloody acts white planters committed against enslaved men and women.

7 “The Lesson of St. Domingo,”Douglass’ Monthly, August 1861.

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African Americans naturally shunned violence, but the “valor and fighting qualities” that

they later displayed “were nourished by the wars which sprang from their own

necessities.” For Haitian slaves, “learning to fight was equivalent to learning to live.”

History taught that on Haiti, slaves fought. “Will the Negro fight as well, if the motive

and the exigency are inferior? We make a present to the Southern negro of an excellent

chance for fighting, with our compliments. Some of us do it with our curses.” Weiss

threatened white southerners who assumed that slaves were both afraid of firearms and

too uncoordinated to use them effectively. Such an assumption was, he insisted, “a great

mistake.”8

Preeminent abolitionists who weighed in on the debate on black soldiers in

popular books and public orations, amplified the emerging belief that one of the landmark

events of African American history portended much for the United States at this defining

moment in its history. In 1863, New York City’s lone black publisher and editor of the

Weekly Anglo-African, Thomas Hamilton, published William Wells Brown’s The Black

Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievement, an anthology which offered

short biographies of fifty-eight of the greatest black men and women in history, including

four soldiers in the Haitian Revolution: Toussaint, his Generals Henri Cristophe and

Dessalines, and the mulatto leader Rigauld. Of the entries, only the section on Nat Turner

exceeded in length that on Toussaint. Brown informed readers that many of the characters

under review were “for the first time put in print.” Black Man gave readers “the

advantage” of acquiring information respecting blacks “seldom acquired.” Brown’s

analysis of Toussaint repeated much of the information contained in his lecture:

8 John Weiss, “The Horrors of San Domingo,”Atlantic Monthly, 9, no. 56 (June 1862): 732-54; 10, no. 58 (August 1862): 212-28; 10, no. 59 (September 1862): 347-59; 11, no. 65 (March 1863): 289-306; 11, no. 68 (June 1863): 768-86.

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Toussaint was a Great Man whose military prowess surpassed all of his other

distinguishing qualities. However, the book also demonstrated that the slaves who

followed Toussaint into battle were equally valiant warriors. When white planters

attempted to deny them the rights guaranteed by the Assembly of Paris, they “awoke as

from an ominous dream, and demanded their rights with sword in hand.” Upon the

commencement of civil war, “the blacks were victorious in nearly all the battles.”9 In

Toussaint L ’Ouverture: Biography and Autobiography, James Redpath edited and

reprinted John Beard’s 1853 biography, along with a translation of Toussaint’s

autobiography, a purported transcript of Toussaint’s memoirs. Redpath stated in the

introduction his reasoning behind the publication. “ Are the Negroes fit for Soldiers?"

Only those who were “Ignorant of the history of Hayti, which forever settled the

question,” still had doubts. “ ‘Are Negroes fit for Officers?' We are entering on the

debate now. The Life of Toussaint may help to end it.”10 William Lloyd Garrison, who

advertised the volume on the pages of his popular abolitionist newspaper, considered the

volume worthy of “a wide circulation —now that the employment of negro soldiers for

the suppression of the Southern rebellion is the settled purpose of the Federal

Government.”11

No abolitionist deployed the Haitian Revolution to justify the policy of arming

African Americans more effectively then Wendell Phillips, the chief architect of the

public memory of Toussaint throughout the nineteenth century. Phillips calculated his use

of the Haitian Revolution to promote black soldiery, as his view on the longstanding

9 William Wells Brown, The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, 2d ed. (New York: Thomas Hamilton, 1863), 6, 96, 101. 10 Redpath, Toussaint L 'Ouverture, vi. 11 “A Book to be Read and Circulated,”Liberator, 23 October 1863.

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contest over its memory indicates. At a fourth of July celebration in 1859, Phillips joined

more than a thousand members of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in a grove in

Framingham, Massachusetts to celebrate the birth of the republic. They also came

together to discuss how to save it from destruction, because of the longstanding failure to

do anything about the cancer that had always plagued it, slavery. The meeting began with

a short introductory address by the president of the society, followed by a talk by Mark

Baker Bird, an America-born minister currently living in Haiti, who traveled from his

Methodist congregation in Port-au-Prince to attend the event. Bird discussed the current

state of Haitian society, admitting its deficiencies; yet he insisted that Haiti was on the

rise. Next came Phillips, who seized the opportunity to offer a few words on the black

republic. Where Bird pondered current affairs, Phillips expounded on Haitian history,

emphasizing its relevance to the sectional crises. Phillips intoned, “We are accustomed to

let the pro-slavery press have its own way in regard to the history of that island,” though

it was among the greatest chapters “in the history of the black race.” Reminding listeners

of the uniqueness of this unprecedented historical event, he asserted, “in the whole

history of civil life, there is not a more skilful [sic.], braver, more bloodless, nor more

successful effort, on the part of an uneducated, unarmed populace to take the government

by its throat, strangle it, and place themselves at the head of affair.” Teeming with a sense

of frustration and anger, Phillips reached the crescendo and fired a rhetorical question

towards his audience on the place of the Haitian Revolution in the American

consciousness, “Deserving our memory!”12

In Massachusetts, Phillips provided a clue to his motivation for the creation of

what is likely the most popular and enduring oration of the Civil War, “Toussaint

12 “The Fourth at Framingham,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 16 July 1859.

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L’Ouverture.” In response to the pro-slavery press having its way “in regard to the

history of that island,” Phillips in the first two years of the war embarked on a personal

journey to return the history of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution to the center of

American memory. As illustrated above, Phillips lectured on Toussaint before the war to

mixed reviews. But after the start of the war, he repeated “Toussaint L’Ouverture”

dozens of times across the United States, from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, to as

far west as Chicago, and as far South as Washington, D.C. In each of these places,

audiences celebrated both the lecturer and the lecture. It was no coincidence that

Phillips’s fame and that of “Toussaint L’Ouverture” peaked at the same time Americans

furiously debated the issue of black soldiery. When Phillips took the podium in New

York and Boston in December 1861, and upon request dusted off a copy of “Toussaint

L’Ouverture,” he delivered the panegyric for the first time in nearly a year. Though the

lecture remained largely the same, the audiences were different. The men and women

who heard Phillips now were hardened by eight months of war and familiar with talk of

runaway slaves, or “contrabands,” and the possibility of emancipation. Conversations on

black soldiers resonated with them. For Phillips and “Toussaint Louverture,” it was a

golden moment. The lecture was a vindication of the Slave Soldier. Phillips reminded,

“there never was a race that, weakened and degraded by such chattel slavery, unaided,

tore of its own fetters, forged them into swords, and won its liberty on the battle-field, but

one, and that was the black race of St. Domingo.”13

While northerners considered the once unthinkable measure of arming black men,

the lecture’s appeal was evident. The Commonwealth recommended to readers “This

great speech giving the history of the NEGRO ARMIES OF ST. DOMINGO.” Phillips’s

13 Wendell Phillips, Toussaint L ’Ouverture, 492.

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“noble panegyric” was the best account of Toussaint’s wonderful career, and it provided

the ideal “answer to the absurd talk of those who say the negroes will not fight.”14 The

Weekly Anglo-African alerted readers, “It will be instructive to read it in these times when

men are praying for an insurrection, but doubting the military capacity of the Negro.”15 A

writer in the New York Tribune avowed, “no subject could be more appropriate to the

hour. We are debating whether we will let the Negro help save the Republic—whether he

has courage to fight and capacity to be a soldier—and since that discussion is conducted

on the other side by help of shrieks over the ‘Horror of San Domingo,”’ it was now more

critical than ever that the public learn the “real history of the revolution in that island.”

The pro-slavery narratives of the revolution, which slandered Toussaint “as the savage

leader of a bloody insurrection” were fallacious. “Let those who believe him such, and

those who doubt whether his race is worthy to fight for its own and the Nation’s

salvation, listen to-night to Mr. Phillips’s brilliant eulogy of this Representative Negro as

soldier, statesman, and patriot.”16

Phillips’s oration illuminates why abolitionists placed great emphasis on the

memory of Toussaint when making a case for black soldiery. As Toussaint’s greatness

stemmed primarily from his use of violence, his military prowess resonated with a people

amidst a brutal war over slavery. Moreover, under Toussaint’s leadership, hundreds of

thousands of armed and enraged black slaves responded to military discipline and rule.

According to Phillips, Toussaint was a man who manufactured an army out of what some

called a “despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of

slavery, one hundred thousand of them imported into the island within four years, unable

14 “Review of the Week,”Commonwealth, 20 March 1863. 15 “Wendell Phillips’ Greatest Speech,”Weekly Anglo-African, 4 May 1861. 16 “Wendell Phillips Speaks Tonight,”New York Daily Tribune, 11 March 1863.

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to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed, and, as you say,

despicable mass, he forged a thunderbolt and hurled it at what? At the proudest blood in

Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood in

Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest in Europe, the English,

and they skulked home to Jamaica.”17 Wells Brown wrote of Toussaint, “Without being

bred to the science of arms, he became a valiant soldier, and baffled the skill of the most

experienced generals that had followed Napoleon. Without military knowledge he fought

like one bom in the camp. Without means he carried on the war.” Toussaint defeated his

enemies on the battlefield, and “turned their own weapons against them. He laid the

foundation for the emancipation of his race and the independence of the island.”18

Abolitionists maintained that black slaves committed no horrors under

Toussaint’s rale. One advocate of black soldiery wrote, “Before L’Ouverture gained the

command, the blacks fought in predatory, guerilla bands, plundering, burning, and

murdering; but he organized them into regular military organizations, disciplined them,

and curbed their fierce and vindictive passions.”19 In the Atlantic Monthly, Weiss quoted

British military officer and historian Marcus Rainsford on his review of fifty thousand

Haitian soldiers. Brigades went through their routines “with a degree of expertness

seldom witnessed, and performed equally well several manceuvers applicable to their

method of fighting.” With the sound of a whistle, “a whole brigade ran three or four

hundred yards, then, separating, threw themselves flat on the ground, changing to their

backs or sides, keeping up a strong fire the whole of the time, till they were recalled; they

then formed again, in an instant, into their wonted regularity.” The men performed this

17 Phillips, Toussaint L ’Ouverture, 478-79. 18 Brown, Black Man, 104-05. 19 “Negroes for Soldiers.”

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exercise with unequaled facility and precision. “Such complete subordination, such

promptitude and dexterity, prevailed the whole time, as would have astonished any

European soldier.” 90 In the New York Evening Post Weiss quoted Lacroix: “It was

remarkable to see the Africans, half naked, with musket & sabre, giving an example of

the severest discipline. They set out for a campaign with nothing to eat but maize,

established themselves in towns without touching anything exposed for sale in the shops

or pillaging the farmers who brought things to market. Supple & tremble before their

officers, respectful to citizens, they seemed only to wish to obey the instinct for liberty

which was inspired in them by Toussaint.”21 The point was clear—under proper

guidance, black slaves were potent weapons.

During the Civil War, Toussaint remained the best answer to the Apocalyptical

Model of the Haitian Revolution. Redpath’s biography demonstrates how, when we

recognize that an important distinction existed between his version and John Beard’s

original biography. Redpath wrote in the introduction, “With this work the editor has

taken the liberty of making a few verbal and other changes in the text of the opening

chapters; of erasing the two elaborated guesses as to Toussaint’s Scriptural studies and

readings in the Abbe Raynal’s philosophy; and of omitting the entire Book IV, which

gave a sketch of the history of Hayti from the death of Toussaint to the reign of the late

Emperor Souloque.” Both the revisions to the opening chapter and the elimination of a

few small passages regarding Toussaint’s learning did little to affect the spirit of Beard’s

book. The deletion of Book IV, however, represents a significant modification. In Book

IV, Beard detailed the racial Apocalypse that took place on Haiti following Toussaint’s

20 John Weiss, “Horrors of San Domingo,” 780. 21 “Will the Blacks Fight,”New York Evening Post.

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abduction, when the colony became “scarcely more than a desert inhabited by hordes of

blacks, simple, ignorant, semi-barbarous, who knew the extremes of slavery and

freedom.” Beard reasoned that after Toussaint departed, it was only a matter of time

before the slumbering volcano erupted. Dessalines, who “was by nature cruel,” rose to

take Toussaint’s place, and immediately “entered on a sanguinary and destructive career,

in which his soul had peculiar delight.” Before long, the fateful expedition began.

“Traversing the towns where Frenchmen had remained, the monster put all to the sword,

with a few exceptions, spared by acts of special grace.” At times, “the massacre was

general; only about one-tenth of the inhabitants escaped.” Redpath omitted these

descriptions, as the American people embarked on a radical experiment in black soldiery.

He avoided reminders of a similar experiment in the recent past that for many had gone

horribly wrong. Redpath admitted the veracity of Book IV. He omitted it nonetheless.22

Letters published in northern newspapers in the first two years of the war

advocating black soldiery illustrate that whether abolitionists cited Toussaint’s

accomplishments as evidence of the capability of black soldiers, or those of the nameless

and faceless slaves who fought alongside him, the Haitian Revolution disproved the

inferiority of the black race. A writer in the Salem Observer remarked on the supposed

docility of African Americans, “we have not much faith in the fighting qualities of the

negro. His nature seems to be too kindly and mellow for such work. But yet, Toussaint

was a negro, and it was a black army which, in Hayti, routed and destroyed in field fights

and in regular sieges, the best legions of France, fresh from the most famous fields of

Europe.” Memory of the Haitian Revolution led this writer to conclude, “the negro may

make a fine soldier after all.” Letters from northerners familiar with slaves added

22 Redpath, Toussaint L’Ouverture, iv, 286, 289, 293-94.

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authenticity. A chaplain in the Union Army who witnessed the organization of black

regiments in Beaufort, South Carolina wrote the Weekly Anglo-African of the military

potential of black soldiers. It was well-known that in St. Domingo, African Americans

“fought and slaughtered the English, the French and Spanish with a courage, and—it

must be admitted—a ferocity scarcely ever equaled.” Such facts were “sufficient to prove

that the fighting element is in the negro character; that in this respect he is like his

fellowmen, and not an exception to all the other nationalities and tribes of earth. That he

has suffered himself to be the victim of a most cruel and oppressive servitude is admitted;

but that fact proves nothing against his spirit and manhood.” Slavery assuredly tested the

spirit of the black man, but “if the incubus of slavery were removed, he would put on

such a garb of manhood as would challenge our respect.”23 J. Miller McKim, a founder of

the Port Royal Relief Committee, responded in a widely disseminated public letter to an

inquiry as to whether the black man possessed “the spirit—the pluck—to do his proper

part in maintaining the status now, or hereafter assigned to him.” Admitting southern

slaves’ aversion to insurrection, McKim suggested that in certain cases “it would not be

safe to count confidently on their fighting qualities.” Nevertheless, he asserted that black

slaves had always, “when occasion required it” shown themselves “capable of the arts of

war.” The slave’s record in Africa, the United States, “and in the history of San

Domingo, furnish ample illustrations of this fact.”24 Wendell Phillips avowed that the

Haitian Revolution vindicated the black race. The Haitian Revolution proved “that the

negro blood, instead of standing at the bottom of the list, is entitled, if judged either by its

23 “Negro-Regiments,” Weekly Anglo-African, 23 May 1863. 24 “The Freed Blacks of South Carolina,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 2 August 1862; for information on the formation of the Port Royal Relief Committee see Willie Lee Rose,Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 75-77.

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great mean of its masses, either by its courage, its purpose, or its endurance, to a place as

near ours as any other blood known in history.”25

The explosion of public memory of the Haitian Revolution that attended the

debate over black soldiery reveals the genesis of a radical transformation that took place

in northern popular culture during the Civil War. The public’s response to the radical

speeches, pamphlets, and books that argued for black soldiery indicate the extent to

which northerners were reconsidering both their ideas on African Americans and the

nation for which African Americans fought and died to preserve. The media response to

Phillips’s “Toussaint L’Ouverture” was especially overwhelming. This is something that

even a cursory glance at popular print media reveals. Two performances of the popular

lecture, which Phillips gave in New York City are illustrative. Advertisements filled

prominent local papers in the days before the lectures, as well as on the day of the events.

The starting time for Phillips’s first lecture, which was set to take place Wednesday,

March 11 at the Cooper Institute was 8 o’clock, with the doors opening a little after

seven. The New York Tribune listed three agents who sold two hundred advance tickets

for fifty cents, making the price of admission double of that before the war. For those

who waited to buy at the gate, the cost was half—yet there was no guarantee that they

would get a good seat or in the door at all.26 The next night Phillips delivered the address

again, this time at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. For this lecture, an additional

number of vendors offered tickets, including the local branch of the Young Men’s

Christian Association, the lecture’s official sponsor. The paper encouraged readers to

attend. Numerous papers reported on the lectures in the following days, thus

25 Phillips, “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” 468-69. 26 “Special Notice,”New York Daily Tribune, 11 March 1863.

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demonstrating the significance of the orations. The New York Tribune reported “immense

audiences” at both lectures.27 “The heroic virtues, the military genius, and the statesman

like sagacity of Toussaint were illustrated, and his noble personal traits described in

glowing eulogy by the orator. The enthusiastic applause of the audience showed how

completely they sympathized with his opinions and convictions.”28 A writer by the name

of Junius reported his first-hand observations of the Brooklyn lecture in the Christian

Recorder. “Desirous of hearing the silver-tongued orator on his favorite theme, I found

my way there through a dense concourse of people. I looked eagerly to see if there were

many colored persons present.” Junius estimated the number of African Americans

present at fifteen. “But the dense mass of whites were like bees, filling every place. The

lecture was grand, and was well worth listening to.” Junius lambasted blacks for not

attending the lecture in greater numbers, though what we know about the readership of

Garrison’s Liberator leads to the conclusion that African Americans rank among the

largest consumers of “Toussaint L’Ouverture” in print form.29 Nevertheless, Junius’s

account is revealing. In the decades before the Civil War, the memory of Toussaint was

at times constricted within the parameters of African-American culture, in black

newspapers, homes, churches, and halls. Nonetheless, by the second year of the Civil

27 “Wendell Phillips’s Oration on Toussaint L’Ouveture,”New York Daily Tribune, 13 March 1863. 28 “Wendell Phillips’s Oration on Toussaint L’Ouveture,”New York Daily Tribune, 12 March 1863. 29 C. Peter Ripley estimates that without the support of African Americans, the “Liberator would not have survived its crucial early years; African Americans underwrote the printing costs for the first issue in 1830, enlisted subscribers, served as agents in most northern cities, purchased the bulk of its advertising, organized the Colored Liberator Aiding Association to coordinate the paper’s fundraising efforts, and contributed hundreds of essays and letters to its columns. A grateful Garrison acknowledged their efforts in 1834 when he wrote that the Liberator ‘belongs especially to the people of color—it is their organ’.” Witness for Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 4-5; See also Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition o f Slavery (1998), 116; Peter P. Hinks,To Awaken My Inflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, (1997), 112-113; Jane J. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks Search for Freedom, 1830-1861 (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 113; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton,Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North, rev. ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier), 1999.

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War, the memory of Toussaint spilled beyond the boundaries of the African American

imagination. Now when the famed orator Wendell Phillips celebrated the life of the rebel

Haitian slave, white spectators filled the seats “like bees.” When Phillips placed

Toussaint’s name above Washington on the list of history’s Great Men, they applauded.

Toussaint was popular.30

Print culture is a powerful vehicle in the construction of public memory. In the

case of the northern memory of Toussaint during the Civil War, it was paramount. The

popularity Phillip’s oration received in concert halls and auditoriums paled in comparison

to the reception northerners awarded it in print. In a remarkable cultural transformation,

book and newspaper publishers transformed Phillips oration into a mass-produced,

consumed, and commodified piece of print culture. The ubiquitousness of “Toussaint

Louverture” in Civil War-era print media has led some scholars to overestimate the

number of times Phillips actually delivered the lecture. Estimates put the number of times

Phillips delivered the lecture in the hundreds.31 This was not the case, yet its widespread

circulation in print makes it appear so. The abolitionist press provided reproductions of

the lecture in print form throughout the duration of the war. Just weeks after the war

began, the oration first appeared in the Weekly Anglo-African and the Pine and Palm,

James Redpath’s radical abolitionist tract, which he published in Boston and New York.32

The first issue of Redpath’s paper included a detachable supplement that was entitled,

30 “Mr. Editor,”Christian Recorder, 28 March 1863. 31 This figure is consistent with James McPherson’s estimation that Phillips gave the speech, “dozens of times.” The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1964), 142; The quotation is from Paul Lauter, ed., Heath Anthology of American Literature, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 1997. 32 There are no extant copies of the printed address; however, the paper reads, “We will publish, week after next, the masterpiece of Wendell Phillips— his oration on Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Revolution of Hayti which swept the whites from the Island.” “Wendell Phillips’ Greatest Speech,”Weekly Anglo- African, 4 May 1861.

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“TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE: AN ORATION, BY WENDELL PHILLIPS.”33 It was

a large one-page, one-sided sheet, which was convenient for display. Redpath printed the

lecture, which was taken from a version printed in the New York Herald a year earlier, in

its entirety, the last column being reduced in size in order to fit on the paper. The public’s

demand for the supplement caught the editor by surprise, so much so that six months later

the paper delivered the following plea: “If any of our readers have copies of the first

number of The Pine and Palm, containing Wendell Phillips’ speech on Toussaint

L’Ouverture, they will confer a great favor by sending it to us. We printed 6,000 copies

of that issue, but not one remains, even for our files.”34 As the war progressed, publishers

printed hundreds of thousands of editions of “Toussaint L’Ouverture.” The lecture

appeared in the most popular abolitionist papers, The Boston Commonwealth, the

National Anti-Slavery Standard, and the Liberator.35 It also appeared in such major

papers as The New York Tribune, which had a daily circulation numbering in the tens of

thousands.36 Papers that reprinted “Toussaint L’Ouverture” provided readers with a

tangible form of the lecture, a material piece of Phillip’s oration. The articles,

supplements, and extras allowed individual readers to share in the experience of the

lecture and bring Toussaint into their shops, offices, and homes, even if they could not

afford to attend a lecture. It also made the lecture available to those who lived in rural

areas outside of the traditional lyceum circuit, where celebrities like Phillips rarely if ever

performed. While only several hundred spectators saw Phillips lecture on March 11,

33 “Toussaint L’Ouverture: An Oration, by Wendell Phillips,”Pine and Palm, 18 May 1861. 34 Pine and Palm, 3 November 1861. 35 “Wendell Phillips, on Toussaint L’Ouverture,”Commonwealth, 3 April 1863; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 11 May 1863; “Toussaint L’Ouverture: An Address by Wendell Phillips, Esq. Delivered at New York March 11, 1863,”Liberator, 3 March 1863. 36 “Wendell Phillips’s Oration on Toussaint L’Ouverture,”New York Daily Tribune, 13 March 1863. For circulation information of the Tribune, see “The New York Tribune,”Leslie's Illustrated, 20 June 1861.

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1863, in New York, when the Liberator reprinted the speech as a part of its weekly

publication, and then later as a supplement it expanded Phillips’s audience immeasurably.

In addition to printing thousands of copies of Phillips’s lecture, northern

newspapers and periodicals secured its widespread distribution. The Liberator provided

readers with the address of the anti-slavery office where they could obtain copies of the

oration, and remarked, “It has been delivered in many places, before crowded audiences,

exciting intense interest and the highest gratification. Now let it be scattered broadcast.”

The paper encouraged other newspapers to reprint the speech “that the people may be

able to read it.” It also sold a “sheet” of the lecture individually for three cents, or by the

■yn “dozen or more” for two cents each. Both the daily and semi-weekly edition of the New

York Tribune included a copy of the oration, remarking, “No more interesting reading can

be sent to soldiers who are fighting our battles, and every person who has friends in the

army should see that they are supplied.” The paper advertised the bulk sale of

prepackaged supplemental copies for five cents apiece, or three dollars per hundred.” The

price rose to four dollars if customers wanted delivery. The paper also provided the

address where interested patrons could contain copies of the speech that came only in

bundles of one hundred.38 The Commonwealth reprinted the lecture in its entirety, telling

readers “it should be circulated every where.” The paper additionally printed the speech

as an extra, and offered it to consumers at two cents per copy, thirty cents per dozen, and

$1.50 per hundred.39 Uninformed consumers walked into the offices of the Weekly Anglo-

37 “Wendell Phillips’s Speech on Toussaint L’Ouverture,”Liberator, 3 April 1863; “Toussaint L’Ouverture,”Liberator, 3/24/1863. 38 “Wendell Phillips’s Oration on Toussaint L’Ouverture,”New York Daily Tribune, 14 March 1863; New York Weekly Tribune, 19 March 1863. 39 “Toussaint L’Ouverture an Address By Wendell Phillips,”Commonwealth, 20 March 1863; “Wendell Phillips, on Toussaint L’Ouverture,”Commonwealth, 3 April 1863.

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African and paid 10 cents apiece.40 The preponderance of these newspaper extras makes

it is easy to imagine standing on a crowded thoroughfare in any Northern city during the

war, and seeing among the cacophony of standard visual eye candy of the day—among

such things as commercial advertisements, recruiting posters, and national flags—copies

of “Toussaint L’Ouverture” displayed in public squares and in the windows and on the

walls of restaurants, shops, and parlors. It is a striking portrait of Northern popular

culture during the Civil War. “Toussaint L’Ouverture” moved from beyond the public

culture of the lyceum and into the hands and homes of readers across the Union, from

oral and print to material and visual culture 41

When Phillips traveled to Washington, DC in the spring of 1862, and more than

two thousand spectators crowded into the largest public room in the nation’s capital to

hear “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” it was clear that something was happening to the

40 “Great Oration o f Wendell Phillips on Toussaint L’Ouverture, Price 10 cents,”Weekly Anglo-African, 30 October 1863. 41 There is another source of the popularity of Phillips’s “Toussaint L’Ouverture” to consider. Early in 1863, James Redpath placed advertisements in multiple Northern newspapers forSpeeches, Lectures, and Letters, a book-length edition of Phillips lectures that was “in preparation,” and included “Toussaint L’Ouverture” among twenty-four other popular orations. Three months later Redpath published the book. The first edition sold out in three days. TheNational Anti-Slavery Standard reported that consumers purchased the volume “as rapidly as it could be bound— while the second was covered by orders received before it was out of press.” A third edition quickly followed. Literary plaudits came in from across the Northeast and as far West as Kansas. One New England paper considered its success evidence of “a marvelous revolution in political sentiment, and it is one that will not go backward.” Newspapers reported the sale of nearly one thousand copies a week between September and October. The book was reprinted in multiple editions, including a “people’s edition,” which appeared on “common paper, in boards, and without portrait,” and a more expensive and “sumptuous style of book-making” known as a “Library Edition.” The Christian Recorder referred to the latter as “one of the finest specimens of book manufacture ever produced in the United States.” TheCommonwealth sought agents to sell the anthology “in every county of the Loyal States,” with “Liberal Commissions allowed.” The paper reported the sale of seven thousand copies by September, and two thousand more the following month. Redpath’s book was published on August 7, 1863, “Speeches and Lectures by Wendell Phillips,”Liberator, 31 July 1863; “Speeches of Wendell Phillips,”The Liberator, 1 September 1863; See “Just Published: Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography,”Commonwealth, 11 September 1863 through 9 October 1863, and “James Redpath, Boston,”American Publisher’s Circular and Literary Gazette, 13 September 1863; “Nearly Ready. Speeches, Lectures, and Letters,”Commonwealth, 28 August 1863; “Books for Our Times,” Christian Recorder, 2 January 1864; “Just Published. Speeches, Lectures, and Letters,” Commonwealth, 17 July 1863; “Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, by Wendell Phillips: Seventh Thousand,” Commonwealth, 18 September 1863 and 9 October 1863; “New Publications,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 1 August 1863.

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collective consciousness of the American people.42 That a number of African Americans

attended the lecture at the Smithsonian Institute and broke the organization’s color bar,

further testifies to this transformation. Upon learning of Phillips’s invitation, William

Lloyd Garrison announced, “The times are changing.”43 A Washington paper announced

that those who wished to hear the lecture on “the Statesman and Patriot of San

Domingo,” must arrive early, “or it will be impossible to gain admittance.” The lecture

was, in the words of Michael Conlin, the “most anticipated” lecture of the year. On the

day of the oration, Phillips had a full schedule. First, he sat in the United States Senate

and listened to debates on the abolition of slavery in Washington. Then “by special

invitation,” he met with the President44 Neither Phillips nor Lincoln recorded whether

the subject of that evening’s lecture came up in conversation. Doubtless, Lincoln knew

what was in store. A newspaper reporter called Phillips’s oration “one of the greatest

efforts of his life.” Its impact on the audience “was indescribable.”45 The Christian

Recorder found Phillip’s acceptance in the Southern city “evidence of the radical change

which has occurred in public opinion on the subject of slavery, and an indication of the

future triumph of the principles of common justice and humanity.”46 The National Anti-

Slavery Standard agreed, noting the “wonderful change in public sentiment.” It summed

up the significance of the event with the following: “Only fifteen months since, Mr.

Phillips could speak in Boston only at the peril of his life; now his most radical views are

42 Michael F. Conlin, “The Smithsonian Abolition Lecture Controversy: The Clash o f Antislavery Politics with American Science in Wartime Washington,”Civil War History 46, no. 4 (2000): 301-23. 43 Pulpit and Rostrum. Sermons, Orations, Popular Lectures, & c., Andrew J. Graham and Charles B. Collar Reporters. Three Unlike Speeches, by William Lloyd Garrison, of Massachusetts, Garret Davis, of Kentucky, Alexander H. Stephens, o f Georgia. The Abolitionists, and their Relations to the War. The War not for Emancipation. African Slavery, the Corner-stone of the Southern Confederacy (New York: E.D. Barker, 1862), 34. 44 “Wendell Phillips,” New York Tribune, in Liberator, 28 March 1862. 45 “Wendell Phillips,”New York Tribune-, Conlin, “The Smithsonian Abolition Lecture Controversy,” 314. 46 “Wendell Phillips,”The Christian Recorder, 29 March 1862.

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enthusiastically applauded, night after night, by audiences filling the largest lecture hall at

the slaveholding Capital.” Such an incident was trifling in itself, “but when the long

proscribed champion of an unpopular but righteous cause suddenly becomes the recipient

of such attentions, they are worthy of mention as indication that the cause is approaching

its triumph.”47 The Boston Journal reported that the lecture took “the town by storm.”

Phillips’s reception was a triumph. Even the opinions of border state men had changed.

“A year ago, I doubt if his friends would have been able to have obtained a hall for him to

lecture in whereas now the portals of the Smithsonian swing invitingly open.”48 The

United States traveled speedily down the path of revolution with Wendell Phillips at the

wheel

Biographers and historians have underestimated the cultural work that “Toussaint

L’Ouverture” performed. The oration impressed a generation of Americans who

experienced the Civil War first-hand, especially those who came of age during the

conflict. A writer in Harper’s Weekly remarked that Phillips drew Toussaint’s life “in

imperishable colors upon the memory of all its hearers.”49 One listener wrote years later

of the speech, it was “the most magnificent specimen of eloquence to which any man of

the present generation has given utterance.”50 Another remarked, “it was a vision of lofty

inspiration under masterly control. And the assembled throng was powerless except to

thunder its applause.”51 Nearly a-half century after the war, George Edward Woodberry

wrote of his youth, “I knew more about negro rights than Latin grammar, Santo Domingo

47 “Wendell Phillips in Washington,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 22 March 1862. 48 “Wendell Phillips in Washington,”Liberator, 21 March 1862. 49 “The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture,”Harper’s Weekly, 19 December 1863. 50 “Wendell Phillips’s Lecture on ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture,’ ”Roxbury Journal, in Liberator, 27 March 1863. 51 Lorenzo Sears, Wendell Phillips: Orator and Agitator (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1909; Reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1967), 244.

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better than the Peloponnesus.” Regarding Phillips’s oration, he continued, “I can

remember the hour and the place when in my boyhood I discovered Shakspeare [sic.],

Byron, Shelley, Carlyle, Scott, Tasso, Virgil, Homer; but there are some names I seem to

always to have known. The Bible, Washington, Whittier, Milton, William Tell, Algernon

Sidney, Garibaldi, Toussaint L’Ouverture . . . I suppose I owe Toussaint L’Ouverture to

Phillips.” The lecture enabled Phillips’s celebrity and professional status. Autograph

collectors hounded him and audiences routinely filled auditoriums beyond capacity.53 In

the winter of 1861-1862, Phillips received roughly two hundred invitations to lecture on

Toussaint and other subjects.54 Horace Greeley indicated the market demand for

Phillips’s orations when commenting on Phillips’s speeches, including “Toussaint

L’Ouverture,” “I doubt that any other living layman’s collected speeches would sell so

well as these.”55 Phillips was conscious of his market value, once writing, “I draw as well

as much money as any one would.”56 Phillips spoke for change, not profit; nonetheless,

his popularity indicates the commodification of the public memory of Toussaint.57 The

lecture cemented Phillips stature among America’s men of letters, and gave him, in the

words of a biographer, “the ear of the North as he never had before.”58

52 Goerge Edward Woodbery, Wendell Phillips: The Faith o f an American (Woodberry Society, 1912), 35. 53 Carlos Martyn, Wendell Phillips: the Agitator (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1890), 446. 54 Irving H. Bartlett, Wendell Phillips: Brahmin Radical (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 247. 55 Wendell Phillips,” Commonwealth, 4 September 1863. 56 Wendell Phillips to Mrs. E.D. Rockwood, [1863 to 1866], American Antiquarian Society. 57 For a concise review of Phillips lifelong desire for and dedication to social change, see Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition & the Men Who Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), Chapter Six. 58 Benjamin N. Martin, Classics of American Literature: Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader, Being Selection from the Chief American Writers (New York: Sheldon & Company, 1871), 208; Irving Bartlett,Wendell Phillips, Brahmin Radical (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961; reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1973), 247; Russel B. Nye estimates that between 1861 and 1862 more than fifty thousand people heard Phillips lecture on various topics, while as many as five million read his various speeches. Oscar Handlin, ed., William Lloyd Garrison and the Humanitarian Reformers (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955), 176.

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Perhaps the greatest indicator of the bearing that Phillips’s “Toussaint

L’Ouverture” had on wartime public culture is the number of imitators it inspired. As

Phillips was unable to quench northerners’ thirst for the memory of Toussaint and the

Haitian Revolution, orators of different races and genders responded to the call.

Recognized abolitionists were among those who joined Phillips in talking about

revolution. William Wells Brown continued to perform his lecture on the Haitian

Revolution, while William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass addressed the subject

at length in public addresses. Lesser-known abolitionists likewise lectured on the Haitian

Revolution. In the Colorado Territory, William J. Hardin delivered a “masterly” oration

on Toussaint in the cities of Central and Black Hawk. It was a lecture especially

appealing to the “intelligent people of color of the two cities on account of the prejudice

existing in the mountain cities.”59 Oneida DeBois, an American-born slave educated at

Oberlin College, who emigrated to Haiti and then returned to the United States,

performed “Hayti and the Haitians” throughout the Northeast, from Philadelphia to

Maine, in an effort to raise funds for Haitian schools.60 In 1863, she crossed the Mason

and Dixon Line and delivered the oration in Baltimore and Alexandria, Virginia.61 In

these southern locales, she performed under the name Oneda Woods, no doubt because of

her status as a runaway. Performing in front of large audiences, she invoked Phillips’s

finale in her conclusion. Struck by the novelty of DeBois’s nationality and gender,

William Lloyd Garrison interviewed the talented speaker and described her as “highly

intelligent and of pleasing address.”62 A writer in Philadelphia called the “exceedingly

59 “Letter from Denver City, Col.,”Christian Recorder, 10 December 1864. 60 “A Colored Female Lecturer,”The Liberator, 8 April 1864. 61 “Baltimore, MD,”Weekly Anglo-African, 14 January 1863. 62 “A Colored Female Lecturer.”

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touching and elegant oration” a vindication of the black race, its soldiers, and “a well-

deserved panegyric” on the Haitian Revolution.63 The Christian Recorder asserted, “She

was not a wit behind Wendell Phillips.”64 DeBois was not the only woman to lecture on

the Haitian Revolution. In New York City, Louisa DeMortie treated a large gathering of a

local literary society to a reading of Whittier’s “Toussaint L’Ouverture.”65 Also in New

York City, grammar school principal and noted orator Alan M. Bland gave a series of

lectures on Toussaint. One observer noted that Bland’s mastery of Toussaint’s life story

made it appear “that he must have been a contemporary,” and quoted Bland on the

significance of Toussaint’s memory: “Toussaint needs no eulogy. No massive monument

of finest Italian marble need rear its lofty pile to remind his country and the itinerant

stranger that beneath its foundation stones are all of the once peerless Toussaint.” The

Haitian’s “heart is his sepulcher, and his epitaph is engraven thereon . . . To forget the

noble Toussaint with his imperishable virtue, will be to forget the immortality of the

soul.”66 Another writer encouraged the readers of the Weekly Anglo-African to attend a

performance of Bland’s lecture, as the oration afforded “an opportunity to compare the

black man’s with the white man’s thoughts on the renowned Haytien hero.”67

High-ranking officers in the Union Army who invoked Toussaint and the Haitian

Revolution in speeches advocating black soldiery illuminate the centrality of African

American history in Civil War public culture. Benjamin Butler deployed the Haitian

Revolution in the defense of black soldiery in a speech delivered before a large and

supportive audience in New York City. Commenting on the role that emancipated slaves

63 “Miss DeBois’s Lecture,”Moravian (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania), inLiberator 8 April 1864. 64 “Alexandria Correspondent,”Christian Recorder, 25 April 1863. 65 “Literary Taste of the Colored People,”Weekly Anglo-African, 12 April 1862. 66 “Lecture on Toussaint L’Ouverture,”Weekly Anglo-African, 21 February 1863. 67 “Mr. Editor,”Weekly Anglo-African, 4 April 1863.

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might play in the Union Army, Butler added that no international law governed the

employment of liberated slaves as soldiers. When asked, “Will the negroes fight?” he

responded that he had no personal experience with freed slaves, but knew of their use as

soldiers throughout history. He reminded his audience that slaves fought admirably in

both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. If these national examples failed to

convince listeners of the capacity of African Americans to fight, Butler remarked, “Let

the veterans of Napoleon I under Le Clerc, who were whipped out from San Domingo,

say whether they will fight or not... If you want to know more than that, I can only

advise you to try them.” According to one newspaper correspondent, the crowd

responded to Butler’s taunt with “Great Applause.” For those unable to attend the

address, publishers quickly made the speech available in newspapers and in pamphlet

form.68 In July 1862, an estimated 100,000 New Yorkers gathered in Union Square to

demonstrate their support of the Union. The New York World described the patriotic

scene.

From the hotels and housetops, and from the churches, the stars and stripes were displayed with the utmost profusion. The windows looking from the residences upon all sides of the Square were thrown up, and the balconies facing them filled with ladies and children, whose presence served greatly to add to the animation of the scene below. Broadway and the other thoroughfares leading to the Square were thronged with the multitudes who had closed their stores and workshops to attend the meeting. Every class and trade were represented. The wealthy millionaire, who had left the luxuries of a well-filled tables and dashed up in a splendid equipages, had come prepared to counsel with the hard-fisted laborer who had left mattock and spade, crow-bar and barrow, to devise means for maintaining the Union; and the voices of both were unanimous that ‘it must and shall be preserved.’

In front of this enthusiastic and partisan multitude, which according to one bystander

68 “Speech of Benjamin Butler,”Douglass Monthly, June 1863;Character and Results of the War. How to Prosecute and How to End it. A Thrilling and Eloquent Speech by Major-General B.F. Butler (Philadelphia: 1863), 18.

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“had no parallel on this continent,” Colonel James Fairman stood at Stand No. 5. A well-

known Unionist and member of the Seventy-Third New York Volunteers, also known as

the Second Fire Zuoaves, Fairman urged those in front of him to remember the Haitian

Revolution. On Haiti, black slaves “under the leadership of a man bom a slave, hurled the

disciplined troops of two of the most warlike nations of Europe, quivering from their

shores.” Haiti’s Slave Soldiers never submitted. It was only through “a meanly contrived

stratagem of the great Napoleon, and by it getting the person of L’Overture in his power,

could France temporarily subdue the little island of Hayti.”69 It was the largest American

crowd to ever hear someone talk about Toussaint.

That more Americans typically read these orations in newspapers and pamphlets

than heard them performed, demonstrates the marriage of orality and print in reviving the

memory of the Haitian Revolution. Nevertheless, it is easier today to gauge the reach of

some of the printed accounts of the Haitian Revolution that made a case for black

soldiery. An example is the commercial success of the books by William Wells Brown

and James Redpath. Frederick Douglass’s Monthly told readers where they could

purchase Brown’s Black Man, and wished “It should find its way into every school

library—and indeed, every home in the land.”70 The Weekly Anglo-African devoted

numerous columns to the book. One reviewer who went on to serve in the Fifty-Fourth

Massachusetts Regiment, considered the book invaluable as a textbook, and thanked

Brown for making the names of African American heroes like Toussaint, “household

69 Proceeding at the Mass Meeting of Loyal Citizens, on Union Square, Newyork. 15th day o f July, 1862 (New York: George F. Nesbitt & Co., 1862), 111-13. 70 “The Black Man,”Douglass Monthly, January 1863.

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words.”71 Another complained that while the section of Toussaint was clearly the best in

the book, “it only occupied twelve pages.72 The newspaper underestimated the impact of

the book on readers, and eventually had to return the money of those who had purchased

the book as they ran out of copies. It offered the following plea to its readers: “We are

desirous that no more orders shall be sent to us for this work as we are unable to fill those

already received.”73 Thomas Hamilton published the first edition of Black Man, which

quickly sold out. R. F. Walcutt, of The Liberator, published the second edition. Redpath

published the third. In three years, the book went through ten printings, including one in

Charleston, South Carolina.74 A writer in the National Anti-Slavery Standard felt that the

sale of such a book in such great numbers indicated, “that a great change has come over

the minds of the American people, and that justice to a long-injured race is not far off.”75

Like Brown’s Black Man, Redpath’s Toussaint L ’Ouver Cure's enjoyed a southern

readership. A series of articles published in the Christian Recorder are instructive. In

1864, the paper offered the book as a prize. It was an important book that “every colored

lady and gentleman ought to have, and white ones, too. We care not who they be.”76 To

readers who raised twenty-five subscribers, the paper promised either a copy ofToussaint

I ’Ouverture, or Wendell Phillips’ Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, which included

Phillips’s lecture on Toussaint.77 For weeks, the paper kept readers abreast of the

competition, admitting the difficulty of keeping up with the demand for Redpath’s book.

“We have received money for Toussaint l’Ouverture, and will forward them as soon as

71 “The Black Man,”Weekly Anglo-African, 28 March 1863; Donald Yacovone, ed.,A Voice o f Thunder: The Civil War Letters o f George E. Stephens (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1997). 72 “The Black Man,”Weekly Anglo-African, March1 1863. 73 “The Black Man,”Weekly Anglo-African, 12 March 1864. 74 “The Liberator Says,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 1 August 1863. 15 National Anti-Slavery Standard, 1 August 1863. 76 “Get Subscribers,”Christian Recorder, 16 January 1864. 77 “A Prize Offered-Who Will Be the First to Take It?,”Christian Recorder, 23 January 1864.

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we get some more on hand, which we are looking for every day.”78 Four months after the

contest began, the paper announced a winner. He was the Reverend Page Tyler, a

missionary on the Mississippi River in the slave state of Missouri, who “like a faithful

servant and soldier of the cross, set about the work and gained the premium.” The paper

promised to forward the prize to “Bro. Tyler,” and then asked readers, “Who will be

next?”79

Reviews of Redpath’s Toussaint L ’Ouverture in American Literary Gazette and

Publisher’s Circular, Harper’s Weekly, North American Review and numerous

abolitionist newspapers illuminate the extent to which northerners had accepted the

public memory of Toussaint as an indispensable tool in the public debate over black

soldiery.80 The biography impressed a writer in the New York Independent, who offered

Toussaint as the founding father of a new nation in which black men fought for freedom

and deserved equality: “[Toussaint L ’Ouverture\ is not only a portrait of a great man, it is

a mirror in which we can study the present and future life of this nation. We have reached

that point in our affairs when we are willing to greet the black man as a soldier. We must

advance to that inevitable goal, when we shall greet him as an officer, a general, a ruler—

when we shall be as unmindful of color as we are now of language.” This was the first

step, and it was costly; but it was only the first step that came with costs. The North lost

“hundreds of millions of treasure, hundreds of thousands of lives. Twenty months of

disaster, with the sacrifice of myriads of our own sons, was required before we would

recognize the negro as a fellow-man. That recognition involves their full possession, of

78 “Prize,”Christian Recorder, 30 January 1864. 79 “Rev. Page Tyler, on the Mississippi, Takes the Premium,”Christian Recorder, 16 April 1864. 80 “Biography. Toussaint L ’Ouverture: A Biography and an Autobiography,”American Literary Gazette and Publisher’s Circular 16 November 1863, 46-47; “The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture,”Harper’s Weekly, 19 December 1863;North American Review 98, no. 203 (April 1864): 595-602.

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all the rights and privileges of a common humanity.” The paper implored, “We yet shrink

from the grant of their claims . . . Americans should study this • life.” * 81 Therrrt

Commonwealth likewise noted the parallels between the events described in Redpath’s

book and the American war. “For years the abolitionists of Europe and America have

seen that we were coming in this country, to a repetition of some of the extraordinary

incidents of Haytian history, and they have dwelt with emphasis on the career of

Toussaint, the greatest military genius ever produced on this side of the ocean.” Still, the

paper maintained, no one on either side of the Atlantic “exhausted, or even approached

the magnitude of their subject. It is impossible to dwell on the story of Toussaint without

wonder approaching to credulity,—for certainly no man in modem days ever had such an

astonishing career.” Taking a page out of Phillips’s panegyric, the paper noted the

differences between Haiti’s founding father and those of the United States. “The

difficulties against which Washington and our fathers contended were as nothing, when

compared with those which this unlettered slave overcame.” The literary review

concluded with one of the most explicit pleas for the importance of the meaning of

Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution for the Civil War. “It is of especial importance at

this time, that these things should be known, and this prodigious page of history studied

with care. We are performing, on the immense stage of a continent, the drama which

went through its island-rehearsal in Hayti in the last decade of the last century. The

capacity of the negro— unassisted by the white man, to raise, arm, discipline, command

and conquer with great armies, was fully proved in the wars of Toussaint and

81 “Editor’s Book Table, Toussaint L’Ouverture,”New York Independent, 4 February 1864.

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Dessalines.” The outcome of the war was unpredictable, yet it was anticipated that “a

chief like Toussaint may rise among our own Negroes.” 82

Immediately after the commencement of the Civil War, African Americans and

their white allies launched an offensive in public arenas and major media to convince

others of the military capability of black men. Their impact on American culture and

memory is immeasurable; however, the dissemination of their words illustrates the

radicalization of public sentiment in the North, as well as in the West and parts of the

South. The Civil War’s transformation forced many Americans to reevaluate their ideas

about race, slavery, and the history of African Americans. Toussaint’s emergence in

popular northern culture suggests the widespread acceptance of the Heroic Model of the

Haitian Revolution. The men and women who heard orations or read the books and

articles on Toussaint had fathers, brothers, and friends dying in battle. Their growing

hatred of white southerners and increasing sympathy for Slave Soldiers enabled them to

empathize with the Haitian rebels who sacrificed their lives to both end slavery and build

a new nation. Though never donning the uniform, the men and woman who lectured,

wrote, and published on Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution proved valorous soldiers in

the civil war of words.

With the number of battlefield casualties rising and increasing numbers of soldier

desertions, sagging morale, and no end to the violence in sight, Abraham Lincoln issued

the Emancipation Proclamation, thus legally freeing slaves in the rebellious states on

January 1, 1863. Slavery survived in the border states and southern territories under the

control of the Union Army. For many abolitionists the proclamation seemed a paper

measure. After all, countless slaves had liberated themselves since the beginning of the

82 “Literary Review,”Commonwealth, 30 November 1863.

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war in spite of the absence of an executive fiat. Nonetheless, an American President took

a decisive and symbolic stand against slavery. Lincoln did something else as well—the

Emancipation Proclamation sanctioned the arming of black soldiers. Lincoln wrote, “I

further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received

into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, position, stations, and other

01 places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.” With that, the United States

government accepted black men into the Union Army. The Civil War had become a

revolution, and to many it mirrored the other war over slavery that took place on Haiti a

half-century before.

83 “Emancipation Proclamation,” in Leslie E. Fishel, Jr., and Benjamin Quarles, eds.,The Negro American: A Documentary History (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1967), 226.

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AMERICAN TOUSSAINTS: BLACK SOLDIERS, BLACK MEMORY, BLACK MEN

The role of black soldiers in the Union war effort gave African Americans a

renewed sense of racial pride, in addition to reinforcing their fidelity to the nation. During

the Civil War, Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution served as touchstones of a

transatlantic black identity among African Americans that blurs the familiar historical

rubrics of free and enslaved, northern and southern, American and African, categories

that historians have traditionally employed to point out the varied and amorphous

constructions of black culture in early America. African Americans’ self-

identification—along with their white allies’ identification of them—with Haiti,

illustrates the ability of collective memory to transcend spatial, temporal, racial, and

national boundaries. When African Americans and their white allies judged the Civil

War, they imagined not only a Second American Revolution, a military conflict to secure

for African Americans both the national and Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality

guaranteed all citizens in the Declaration of Independence, but a Second Haitian

Revolution, a violent social upheaval in which black slaves warred against their white

masters and in the end emerged triumphant.

This chapter examines in two parts how the radical transformation of free blacks

and slaves into soldiers amplified African Americans’ racial identification with Haiti, as

129

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black men strived to be American Toussaints. The first section evaluates the public

memory of the Haitian Revolution among black abolitionists and their white allies, while

the second focuses on this revival among both free and enslaved black southerners. The

memory of the Haitian Revolution served as an important source of a collective racial

identity that united African Americans across time and space, and out of disparate groups

of freed people and slaves, made one. This collective sense of belonging, and history,

armed black men in their fight for freedom, and prepared them for their new lives as

citizens. White abolitionists reinforced African Americans’ racial identification with

Haiti, for when they saw armed and uniformed black men they likewise imagined

American Toussaints, intelligent and enlightened Slave Soldiers who were anxious and

able to exercise the freedom and equality for which they fought. Caught in the firestorm

that would eventually end slavery, African Americans and their white allies formed an

infrangible interracial alliance that centered on the history and memory of the most

successful slave revolt in world history. It was an ideological partnership, which was

extraordinary for its time and unprecedented in the short history of the United States.

Abolitionists early recognized the power of the memory of the Haitian Revolution

among black men. Shortly after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Frederick

Douglass deployed this imagery in “Men of Color, to Arms!” In the widely reprinted

article that sought to increase the number of black volunteers, Douglass insisted that

black men live up to the standard set by contumacious Americans such as John Brown,

Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. Douglass exhorted black men to redeem their manhood,

for “Liberty won by white men would lose half its luster.”1 He thirsted for a violent end

to slavery and felt that the assertion of black masculinity was the best possible means of

1 “Men of Color, to Arms!”Douglass' Monthly, March 1863.

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achieving that end. Black men proving their manhood was a central part of his millennial

vision.2 During his years in servitude, Douglass tried to run away on several occasions,

and eventually succeeded; but it was always his decision to fight that he credited with

making him a man. Douglass never forgot the moment he became a man. It happened in

his youth after his master placed him under the oversight of a vicious and violent slave

breaker named Edward Covey. For weeks, Covey whipped, harassed, and set his hounds

on Douglass until one day after being knocked to the ground, Douglass “resolved to

fight.” With a “fighting madness,” Douglass fought off the brutal overseer with blow

after blow, at one point holding him “so firmly by the throat, that his blood followed my

nails.” When it was over, “Covey seemed to have lost his usual strength and coolness. He

was frightened.” For Douglass, it was the turning point of his life. “I was a changed being

after that fight. I was nothing before; I WAS A MAN NOW.”3 Douglass’s faith in

masculine violence was not unique among his contemporaries. Historian Bruce Dorsey

has described the gendered language of the abolitionist movement, pointing out the extent

to which black and white abolitionists’ ideas of black manhood routinely stood in

opposition to one other.4 While the literature of white abolitionists emphasized the

sentimental and feminine character of black slaves, the slave narratives of Douglass and

other black abolitionists exhibited “an ever-present struggle of resistance that would

2 David Blight,Frederick Douglass ’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge and London: The Louisiana State University Press, 1989); John Stauffer describes the acceptance of violence as a legitimate weapon in the war against slavery among four leading radical abolitionists: Douglass, James McCune Smith, John Brown, and for a time, Gerrit Smith. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation o f Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), Chapter Five. 3 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 242-246. 4 Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), Chapter Four.

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demonstrate the manliness of enslaved men.”5 It is no wonder, then, that the Haitian

Revolution meant so much to Douglass and other black abolitionists, since during this

apocalyptic event hundreds of thousands of black men proved their manhood through

violence.6

Douglass’s “Men of Color, to Arms!” became one of the most widely reprinted

articles of the Civil War, appearing in every major abolitionist and Republican sheet. The

slogan quickly became the rallying cry for black soldiers and recruiters throughout the

North. Though failing to explicitly mention Toussaint or the Haitian Revolution in the

article, we cannot presume Douglass lacked identification with them. More likely, as

historian Bruce Dain suggests, abolitionists like Douglass at times refrained from

invoking the black republic to avoid conjuring images of racial unrest and the failed

experiment of black national independence that contemporary Haiti provided.7 Black

leaders chose their words carefully; nonetheless, it is clear that Douglass held the “black

republic,” along with its people and its history in high esteem. He especially admired

5 Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 193. Anthony Rotundo has found that in the nineteenth century the middle-class notion of manhood changed from a communal, collective ideal to a more individualistic one that emphasized man’s struggle to contain innate animalistic impulses. David Leverenz, likewise, describes a contest among men between traditional patrician notions of manhood and an insurgent, individualized and aggressive ideal concomitant with the transformative economic and social changes wrought by the Market Revolution and liberal capitalism. In both cases, a belief in both the redeeming qualities of violence and its centrality to the construction of masculinity permeated American life, as men increasingly recognized the noble and virtuous qualities of savagery, and yearned to prove their manhood through violence. E. Anthony Rotundo,American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 222-46; David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 6 Stanley Harrold’s and John R. McKivigan’s collection of essays reveals the growing militancy of abolitionists in the 1850s and details their growing commitment to violence to end slavery.Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999). 7 Bmce Dain, “Haiti and Egypt in Early Black Racial Discourse in the United States,”Slavery and Abolition 14, 3 (December 1993), 139-61. Dain likely goes too far in describing African Americans’ ambivalence towards Haiti. Haiti was simply not alone among contemporary and ancient black nations that gave African Americans much to admire and emulate.

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o , , Toussaint, a man many compared to Douglass himself. Douglass often invoked Haiti’s

founding father in a popular oration delivered on the antebellum lyceum circuit, insisting,

“In an age of great men he [Toussaint] towered among the tallest of his times.”9 Only a

month before the start of the Civil War, Douglass revealed to readers of his monthly

paper, “A dream, fondly indulged, a desire, long cherished, and a purpose, long

meditated, are now quite likely to be realized.”10 Douglass was to sail for Haiti, “the

theatre of many stirring events and heroic achievements, the work of a people, bone of

our bone, and flesh of our flesh.” In a surprising turn, the avowed opponent of

colonization planned to explore Haiti’s prospects as a location for black emigrants. Only

the start of the war kept him from making the trip.

Three aspects of Douglass’s published call to arms reveal his extensive reliance

on the public memory of the Haitian Revolution. First, historical and biographical

narratives of the Haitian Revolution published just prior to, and during the Civil War,

invoked Douglass’s battle cry. Charles Elliot Wyllys’s 1855 New York City lecture, for

example, revealed that during the revolution “ ‘Liberty! ’ and To arms! To Arms!” were

on the tongue of every Haitian slave.11 Both John Beard’s biography of Toussaint and

Redpath’s popular 1863 reprint included a copy of a letter written by Toussaint in which

8 Following the Civil War, Douglass served as the first American Minister to Haiti. For one of Douglass’ lengthiest treatment of Toussaint, see “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, Container 31, Microfilm reel 19; David Turley describes British reactions to Douglass on a visit to England in 1846, and the subsequent comparisons to Toussaint, in “British Unitarians, Frederick Douglass and Race,” in Martin Crawford and Alan Rice, eds.,Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 12. 9 Frederick Douglass, “The Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men: An Address Delivered in Halifax, England, on 4 January 1860,” in John Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds.,The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interveiws, vol. 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 291. 10 “A Trip to Hayti,”Douglass ’ Monthly, May 1861. 11 Charles Wyllys Elliot,Heroes are Historic Men. St. Domingo, its Revolution and its Hero, Toussaint Louverture. An Historical Discourse Condensed for the New York Library Association, February 26, 1855. (New York: J. A. Dix, 1855), 14.

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he explained how armed slaves nearly destroyed one Haitian town, but for the calm and

discipline of black officers. Toussaint wrote in the letter, “there arose a cry ‘To arms!’ . ..

[and] had a single musket fired, the city would have perished.” Second, these histones

and biographies told that Haitian slaves charged into battle behind Toussaint singing “La

Marseillaise,” the battle song of the French Revolution that included the lines, “Aux

armes! Citoyens; formez voz bataillons.” During the Civil War, African Americans knew

“La Marseillaise” and often sang it in public gatherings.13 Third, many Americans would

have recognized the slogan, “To arms!” as Toussaint’s famous last words, uttered on the

last line of Alphonse De Lamartine’s dramatic poem “Toussaint L’Ouverture.”14 With

broadsides emblazoned with the slogan “Men of Color, to Arms!” littering the streets of

crowded cities and towns, the connection between the Civil War and Haitian Revolution

was evident to African Americans. The front page of a black French-language newspaper

in Louisiana revealed in bold letters the long reach of Douglass’s clarion call: “AUX

ARMES! c’est notre devoir.”15

12 John Relly Beard,The Life o f Toussaint L ’Ouverture, The Negro Patriot ofH ayti: Comprising an Account o f the Struggle for Liberty in the Island, and a Sketch o f its History to the Present Period (London : Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853), 107; James Redpath,Toussaint L ’Ouverture : Biography and Autobiography (Boston : James Redpath, 1863), 99. 13 The Union veteran and black historian George Washington Williams wrote, “the black troops charged, singing, ‘La Marseillaise.’ ”History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865. Preceded by a Review of the Military Services of Negroes in Ancient and Modern Times (New York: Harper Brothers, 1888), 50; C. Peter Ripley, ed.,Black Abolitionist Papers (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1985-), vol. V, 51; “Flag Presentation in Baltimore,”Weekly Anglo-African, 29 August 1863. 14 Alphonse de Lamartine, Oeuvres Poetiques Completes de Lamartine (Paris: 1832; reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 1401. In “Toussaint Louverture” Lamartine repeats a black version of the Marseillaise slaves sang in revolutionary Haiti, 1264-65; The original song also appealed to Confederates, who likewise repeated its lyrics throughout the war; however, one writer traveling through the South warned of the danger inherent in such a practice: “The younger members of the party astonish the night-owls with patriotic songs, chiefly French, and the French chiefly with the ‘Marseillaise,’ which, however appropriate as the slogan of the Confederate states, they persist in quavering, forgetful, perhaps, that not three-quarters of a century ago Toussaint l’Ouverture caught the words and air of his masters, and awoke the lugubrious notes of the insurrection.” Sir William Howard Russell,Pictures o f Southern Life, Social, Political, and Military (New York: J. G. Gregory, 1861), 83. 15 “Aux Armes!”L ’Union, 2 June 1863.

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Other recruiters of black soldiers were more explicit than Douglass, invoking

Toussaint and the thousands of slaves who fought alongside him as an endorsement of

military service. One published call for recruits maintained that the army provided black

men the “opportunity to display those qualities which the experience of this war, as well

as the history of Toussaint’s Battles, has shown him to possess.”16 A southern black

newspaper correspondent of the Weekly Anglo-African implored, “Men of color, my

fellow-citizens, do not stop to ask the question: ‘What are we going to fight for?’ but

enlist, buckle on your armour, and with strong arms and brave hearts go into this war and

fight for your rights. Did Toussaint L’Ouverture stop to ask that question? Did his

followers stop to ask that question.” The answer was “No, no, not at all. They rose up

with all their strength and struck blow after blow for freedom, and this day their posterity

are enjoying the fruits of their victories.” The author called on African Americans to

repeat the success of their Haitian brethren, concluding, “Let us as a people emulate their

example.”17 Another writer envisioned the revolutionary possibilities for black men as the

result of military service, arguing that by copying Toussaint they would open the door to

both freedom and equality. Though African Americans served in the United States

American army before and the government denied them their rights, now the interests of

the black man were at stake. The author’s affinity for Toussaint and advocacy of the

nation is revealing. “Every young man of this blood should prepare himself for the

glorious destiny of sharing in the duties and honors of the then only free and great nation

in the world. Let him study and emulate this greatest of Africans [Toussaint] and not a

whit behind the greatest of men.” Whites must also acknowledge genius, the paper

16 “The Colored Regiments of Massachusetts,”Weekly Anglo-African, 19 December 1863. 17 “Letter from Washington,”Weekly Anglo-African, 1 August 1863.

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continued, “whatever be the color of the skin that enwraps it; and they must prepare

themselves to welcome the leadership of our armies and our Senate . .. black Toussaints,

who, by their superior talents and principles, shall receive the grateful homage of an

appreciative and admiring nation.”18 The United States needed American Toussaints to

redeem both the nation and the black race. Once accomplishing this, the possibilities

were endless.

African Americans identified with Toussaint, and when the opportunity presented

itself, they enlisted in the Union Army, intent on reenacting his phenomenal

accomplishments. The record of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment is illustrative.

Immortalized in scores of soldier narratives, Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Shaw Memorial,

and the popular motion picture Glory, the Fifty-Fourth holds a special place in the

American memory of the Civil War.19 The regiment’s longstanding popularity rests on

several factors. First, organized in New Bedford, Massachusetts in the spring of 1863, the

Fifty-Fourth was the first black regiment organized in the North. Prominent abolitionists

Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Wendell Phillips were among its well-known

recruiters and supporters. Its location and organizers made the regiment a favorite of the

local abolitionist press. Second, the regiment’s famous assault on Fort Wagner, under the

direction of the white Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, lent itself to celebration by white

abolitionists. After all, one of their own gave his life to end slavery. Third, the Fifty-

Fourth’s story is a palatable one for northerners, as it fit squarely into the narrative of

northern exceptionalism. Writers told the tale of a regiment of free black

18 “Editor’s Book Table, Toussaint L’Ouverture,”New York Independent, 4 February 1864. 19 Martin J. Blatt, Thomas J. Brown, and Donald Yacove, eds.,Hope and Glory: Essays on the Legacy o f the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). 20 Noah Andre Trudeau reports “246 killed, 890 wounded, and 391 taken prisoner.”Like Men o f War: Black Troops in the Civil War 1862-1865 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 86.

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men—northerners—going south to end slavery, a despicable and peculiarly southern

institution. It is not the story of black slaves taking up arms, fighting and killing whites in

battle. Yet most soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth did not live in Massachusetts, or, for that

matter, New England, in spite of the legend. They came from every northern and border

state. Thirty-seven came from the South. Five were West Indian. Approximately twenty- 21 five percent were ex-slaves, and nearly all had family or friends in bondage. Many were

sailors, making it likely that they had at least visited southern ports. Thus, for the soldiers

of the Fifty-Fourth the journey south was a homecoming. These men fought not to free

“the slaves,” but their enslaved brothers and sisters. 22

The men of the Fifty-Fourth took inspiration from the Haitian Revolution. One of

the most celebrated soldiers of the regiment was the former slave and Sergeant William

H. Carney, a native of Norfolk, Virginia.23 At Fort Wagner Carney suffered injuries to his

legs, chest, and arm while holding the American flag aloft, and because of his heroism

became the first African American to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. What is

less known is that when Carney and the rest of C Company stormed Battery Wagner, they

went by the name of the “Toussaint Guards.” The Company nickname is something

historians of the Civil War overlook, though contemporaries rarely failed to mention it.24

Originally, the Company went by the name “Morgan Guards,” in honor of one of the

21 Edwin S. Redkey, “Brave Black Volunteers: A Profile of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment,” in Blatt, et al., Hope and Glory, 21-34. 22 James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton detail the common struggle of northern and southern blacks in In Hope o f Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Patrick Rael explicates the shared identity of African Americans in spite of racial, sectional, and economic obstacles inBlack Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), Chapter One. 23 Liberator, 6 November 1863. 24 The New Bedford Mercury commonly used “Toussaint Guards” when referencing the regiment throughout the spring of 1863. For example, see March 23 and 27, and April 20, 1863. For examples in other papers, see: Letter to the Editor, The Christian Recorder, 4 April 1863; “Reception of the Toussaint Guards,”Liberator, 15 September 1865.

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regiment’s most loyal supporters, a wealthy New Bedford merchant, S. Griffits Morgan.

However, on March 23, 1863, the New Bedford Mercury reported the changing of the

name to the “Toussaint Guards.”25 According to the paper, the change occurred “in

compliance with the very proper suggestion of our townsman S. Griffits Morgan, Esq.”

While it is tempting to credit this elite, white benefactor with the moniker, there is reason

to believe the soldiers themselves share responsibility. There was much of the Haitian

Slave Soldier these men admired, and with which they identified.

Soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth knew Haitian history. Sergeant Frederick Johnson

made sure of it. Johnson worked as a hairdresser in Boston before joining the army, but

during the war, in addition to serving as a clerk, he regularly distributing among the

regiment copies of the Weekly Anglo-African.26 It is significant that the soldiers of the

Fifty-Fourth read the one serial published during the Civil War that more than any other

consistently provided readers with detailed information on the Haitian Revolution.

Frederick Douglass’s two sons served in the Fifty-Fourth. Lewis Douglass, the eldest,

served as Sergeant Major, and historian Joseph Glatthaar has noted that, “few white

soldiers in the Union Army, officers or enlisted men, possessed” his “writing fluency.”27

Lewis grew up in the offices of his father’s newspapers, the North Star and Douglass ’

Monthly, where he learned the printer’s trade and assisted in the writing, editing, and

printing of the articles on Haiti that appeared in both papers. 98 A couple members of the

Fifty-Fourth revealed particular interest in Haiti. Martin Delany’s son Toussaint

L’Ouverture Delany, was doubtless well aware of his namesake. Rhode Island native

25 “The 54th Regiment,”New Bedford Mercury, 23 March 1863. 26 Ripley,Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 5, 245. 27 Joseph T. Glatthaar,Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance o f Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Free Press, 1990), 178. 28 Ripley,Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 5, 243-45; Frederick Douglass Papers, vol. 4, 232.

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Charles E. Greene had for years held sacred the memory of the Haitian Revolution, and

hoped to see the day when he could partake in the violent end of slavery in America.

Green joined the Fifty-Fourth in February 1863, and lost his life a year later in Beaufort,

South Carolina. But years earlier the Union Army refused the services of this man

because of his complexion. Consequently, Green and other black men in Providence,

Rhode Island formed a military company and began drilling.29 After learning of a

growing disturbance among Haitians and Dominicans in the summer of 1861, Greene

forwarded a letter to James Redpath’s Pine and Palm, the official organ of the Haitian

Emigration Bureau. Greene offered Redpath his services and that of several other men

from his unit to aid the Haitians. “We would like to know,” Greene asked,” if we could

go as a military body. If so, we go tofight.” Greene’s abolitionism transcended oceans

and boundaries. He wished to fight for black freedom wherever it was in jeopardy. It

seems likely that Johnson, the Douglasses, and Greene would have played a part in the

renaming of the Fifty-Fourth.

Greene’s offer to fight in Haiti spurred imitators among other African Americans

who likewise went on to serve in black regiments. William H. Johnson of the Eighth

Connecticut Volunteers hoped to travel to Haiti to assist in the war with Santo Domingo,

•5 ft but first there was a war to fight at home. Johnson wrote to Redpath, “I am at present

engaged to follow this war against the slave propagandists of the South. We will conquer.

Slavery will finish.” After avenging John Brown, Johnson explained, “I will be able to go

to the Haytian war against despotic Spain, and carry with me a practical knowledge of

modem warfare, and a contingent of intellect and military strength.” The noted Midwest

29 Letter to the Editor, Pine and Palm, 20 June 1861. 30 “Volunteers for Hayti,”Pine and Palm, 29 June 1861.

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orator H. Ford Douglass likewise offered to serve in Haiti. The runaway slave who went

on to serve in both a white and black Union regiment remarked on the new threat to

Haitian independence: “If there is to be any fighting in the island . .. please count me

in.”31 Neither of these black soldiers ever left for Haiti, but their interest in coming to the

defense of Haitians and their subsequent personal sacrifices for the Union army indicates

their primary motivation for enlistment. They went to war to see slavery end and redeem

their race throughout the Atlantic world, to continue the struggle begun on Haiti a half-

century before.32

African Americans’ veneration of Haiti did not detract from their devotion to the

United States. In Philadelphia, John C. Bowers was among those who presented the

regimental colors to the Sixth United States Colored Troop. The flag was six feet tall by

six feet six inches wide. On one side was the Goddess of Liberty, holding the “American

ensign.” On the other side was the United States coat of arms. Bowers addressed the men

of regiment. “The time has come when we are called upon by our countrymen to

participate in this deadly strife; and, as in days of yore, our people are rushing beneath

her standard with alacrity.” The effort black man made to secure victory for the Union

was astonishing. “In this bloody strife, unparalleled in modem warfare, to fight the battle

of freedom; and may each and every one be imbued with a similar courage as

characterized Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at the pass of Thermopylae, Toussaint

31 “Speaking of the San Domingo Spanish Imbroglio,”Weekly Anglo-African, 4 May 1861. Douglas’s story is remarkable. A Virginia fugitive with fare skin, Ford served in the early years of the war in the all-white 95th Illinois Regiment, where his fellow soldiers treated him amiably. In 1863, he relocated to Chicago where he worked to recruit black soldiers. A year later, he enlisted as a captain of the black Kansas First Heavy Artillery. Soon after joining this black regiment, Douglas died as the result of illness. “Mournful News,” Weekly Anglo-African, 16 November 1865; Robert L. Harris, Jr., “H. Ford Douglas: Afro- American Antislavery Emigrationist,”Journal of Negro History 62, no. 3 (July 1977): 217-34. 32 Virginia Matzke Adams, On the Altar o f Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letters from the Front, Corporal James Henry Gooding (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), xxx; Harry A. Ploski and James Williams, eds., The Negro Almanac (Detroit: Gale Research, Inc, 1989), 834.

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L’Ouverture, Cristophe and Dessalines in St. Domingo. Our fathers at Red Bank in 1776,

at New Orleans in 1812, our brethren at Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, Georgia, Florida,

Kansas, and South Carolina.” The survival of the United States depended on black men,

and Bowers implored the soldiers before him to proudly bear the flags of both their

country and their regiment on every battlefield where they met the enemy. The conflict

was between freedom and slavery, and it would require bloodshed. When the final battle

ended, they would trample the black flag of slavery under their feet, “while the glorious

Stars and Stripes, emblems of freedom to all mankind, irrespective of clime or

complexion, will wave in graceful folds, its red, white and blue, over the land of the free

and the home of the brave.”33

One gifted black soldier who shared Bowers’s dual identification with both his

nation and his race enlisted in the Union Army as a teenager to save his “beloved

country” from the disease of slavery.34 Decades later, he became the first chronicler of

the black soldier’s Civil War experience. In A History o f the Negro Troops in the War o f

the Rebellion, George Washington Williams described the Civil War as a climactic battle

in a war for black freedom that began on Haiti, and recognized the place of black Union

soldiers alongside Toussaint in the struggle to end slavery throughout the Atlantic world.

Williams referred to Haiti as the “scene of modem Negro soldiership.” Numerous black

generals distinguished themselves in the Haitian Revolution, but “the most commanding

character was Toussaint l’Ouverture.” The great leader united blacks and whites, wrote a

constitution, and created a republic without slavery. The Civil War was but a

continuation of his work. Even after the Civil War, Williams remembered his debt to

33 “The Flag Presentation at Chelton Hills,” Weekly Anglo-African, 12 September 1863. 34 George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 (New York: George Putnam’s Sons, 1883), viii.

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Toussaint. He bemoaned the lack of a monument of “marble or brass” to the black

soldier, but took solace that on Toussaint’s “island home the little republic he built still

stands a monument to his valor as a soldier, and sagacity as a statesman; write his deeds,

like stars, illumine the page of history, and his Christian character and shinning example

have an immortal place in the literature of the world.”35

Williams, an educated free black man from the North identified with Haiti’s Slave

Soldiers. In at least one case, however, a Haitian revealed a shared identity with African

Americans by enlisting in the Union Army. H. W. Dorsey was bom in Port au Prince in

1840 and traveled to the United States at age twenty-one. Dorsey landed in New Orleans

and placed advertisements in local papers searching for his father, mother, and sister.

Eventually word of their whereabouts came via the New York Tribune, and Dorsey

traveled to New York City and reunited with his family. The Haitian then “became

imbued with the spirit of the war and after President Lincoln’s proclamation of

emancipation enlisted and served until mustered out Oct. 25, 1863.”36 This is a rare

documented case of a Haitian serving in the Union Army. It is testimony to both the

transatlantic nature of the Civil War, and the tradition of black soldiery throughout the

35 Williams, History o f the Negro Troops in the War o f the Rebellion, 1861-12,65, 40, 45-46, 54; John Hope Franklin, “George Washington Williams, Historian”Journal of Negro History 31, no. 1 (January 1946): 60-903; African American memory of President George Washington is a story yet to be told. Among the nineteenth-century blacks sharing the name of the Founding Father, are George Washington Adams, George Washington Bell, George Washington Brooks, and George Washington Carver. A number of African-American “George Washingtons” served in the Union Army. In spite of this naming tradition, it is still not clear whether the names of famous nineteenth-century blacks indicates that an affinity existed for the Founding Father. In the case of Williams and other free blacks, black parents selected the name. Often, however, slaves were assigned names by masters. Joice Heth’s story has been cited as evidence of a slave remembering Washington favorably. Yet Lawrence Levine writes of an oral tradition among African Americans in Washington, D.C., in which Washington is best remembered for his desire to “Forever keep the niggers down.” Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Lawrence W. Levine,Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 88. 36 William Adams, Historical Gazetteer and Biographical Memoir of Cattaraugus County (Syracuse: Lyman, Horton and Co., 1893), 989-990.

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African Diaspora.37 Dorsey’s story is unique, yet when read alongside the stories of

native Africans and West Indians who fought in the Civil War, and the African American

colonists who emigrated to lie a Vache, a tiny island on the Haitian coast in 1862, and

returned to serve in the Union army, it becomes clear that the war to end slavery in the

United States transcended time, borders, and battlefields.38

African Americans fought to end slavery in the United States, and following

heroic displays like the Fifty-Fourth Regiment’s assault on Fort Wagner, the northern

press quickly spread the word of the bravery and success of the experiment in black

soldiery. Abolitionists’ invocations of Toussaint reinforced African Americans’

identification with a black Atlantic revolutionary tradition. An Ohio newspaper, which

weeks earlier printed a narrative of the Haitian Revolution, felt its readers could “not fail

to perceive the exact similarity of the stubborn heroism of the Louisiana colored guard at

Port Hudson, to the desperate valor of the negro soldiers at the siege of Crete-a-Pierrot”

in Haiti.39 General William S. Smith called black soldiers the best in the army. This was

no surprise based on his knowledge of history. “Look back a quarter of a century,” Smith

told a writer for the New York Times, “to the heroic deliverer of St. Domingo, who made

even NAPOLEON tremble at his power.”40 J. F. Cooke, a prominent member of the

37 For the transatlantic tradition of black resistance and black soldiery throughout the Americas, see: Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998); Jane Landers,Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Matthew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America"The Americas 57, no. 2 (October 2000): 171-205; John Thornton,Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,”American Historical Review 6, no. 4 (1993), 1101-1113; “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,”Journal of Caribbean History [Barbados] 25, 1 and 2 (1991): 58-80; Peter M. Voelz, Studies in African American History and Culture (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993). 38 For colonists returned from Haiti and recruited for enlistment see, “Letter from Teachers of the Freedmen,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 16 April 1864. For reports of Africans in the Union Army, see “Native Africans Enlisting,”Douglass’ Monthly, April 1863; Glathaar,Forged in Battle, 41. 39 “The Colored Troops,”Newark North American, 12 June 1863. 40 “The Siege of Vicksburgh,”New York Times, 9July 1863.

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Relief Association for the Contrabands in the District of Columbia, commented on the

significance of the Civil War while praising the heroism of black soldiers in Kansas,

Florida, and Louisiana: “The conflict is not between the North and South, it is of nobler

aspect, of transcendently higher nature.” It was of freedom, equality, and slavery. “A

strife between civilization and barbarism, truth and error, right and wrong.” Cooke

informed the members of the First District Columbia Volunteers who stood in front of

him that, “To-day we are making our own history—history that will bid defiance to

prejudice and partiality.” Americans no longer needed to “rake the far past” for black

military heroes. Gone was the necessity to invoke foreign and dated racial paragons, like

Hannibal, the “slave martyrs of 1776 and 1812,” or “the soldier and the statesman of San

Domingo, Toussaint L’Overture.” Now the accomplishments of black soldiers in the

Union Army were worth remembering.41

Tales of the heroism of individual black soldiers prompted historical comparisons.

William Tillman was among the first African Americans to receive significant attention

in the northern press for militant action. The free black cook on a ship traveling from

New Jersey in July 1861, Tillman found himself counted among the booty of Confederate

privateers. On the journey to South Carolina he confided to a passenger, “I am not going

to Charleston a live man.”42 Around midnight on July 16, Tillman snuck upon the ship’s

captain, master, and first mate as they slept, and with a hatchet took each of their lives

with a single blow to the head. After discarding the lifeless bodies overboard, he

imprisoned two remaining white sailors and directed the boat to New York City, where it

landed on July 21. He was an instant celebrity.The New York Tribune feted him on its

41 “Anniversary of the Association for the Relief of Contrabands in the District of Columbia,”The Christian Recorder, 22 August 1863. 42 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1981), 33.

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front page. The paper reported that he “created such an interest in the public mind that

Mr. Bamum has induced him to receive visitors at the Museum for the next few days.”43

Harper’s Weekly printed a number of illustrations, including one of Tillman emerging

from the ship’s belly, with hatchet in hand, preparing to attack. Douglass’ Monthly

accorded him “a degree of personal valor and presence of mind equal to those displayed

by the boldest deeds recorded in history.” Among the men Tillman deserved comparison,

was “Toussaint L’Ouverture.”44

For abolitionists the analogy between American Slave Soldiers and Haiti’s Great

Man was obvious. A black writer in Washington, DC, reported that when abolitionist

Owen Lovejoy addressed a gathering of some two thousand at Israel Church, he

remarked that when the government called on African Americans to fight, “he believed

there would be found many a Touissant L’Overture amongst us.”45 Abolitionists

penetrated the South alongside Union soldiers and sent reports home of their first-hand

impressions of southern slaves. A number of papers carried the story of “a new

Toussaint,” a Virginia contraband named Jim Lawson in northern Virginia.46 After

separating from his master, Lawson served as a scout for the Union Army and repeatedly

risked re-enslavement and his life to assist Union forces. The heroism demonstrated by

this husband, father, and slave was deserving of “more honor than that accorded

TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE, in the brilliant lecture delivered by WENDELL

PHILLIPS,” one writer concluded. “He is unquestionably the hero of the Potomac, and

deserves to be placed by the side of his most renowned black brethren.” One

43 Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War, 33; “The Schooner S. J. Waring,”Harper’s Weekly, 3 August 1861. 44 “A Black Hero,”Douglass ’ Monthly, August 1861. 45 “Hon. Owen Lovejoy,”Weekly Anglo-African, 25 January 1862. 46 “A Rival of Toussaint L’Ouverture,”New York Times, 24 March 1862; “A New Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Chicago Tribune, 27 March 1862.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. correspondent described the “Toussaint L’Ouverture of the 29th,” Sergeant Major Horace

N. Lowden of the Twenty-Ninth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers. He was “one of the

noblest and finest specimens of physical development, whose princely bearing and

martial tread” indicated that he was bom to lead men both on the battlefield and in civil

life.47 Prince Rivers was another Slave Soldier who gained notoriety in the northern

press. Known for his dark skin, physical prowess, and natural leadership abilities, this

South Carolina fugitive slave, who enlisted in the First South Carolina Volunteers and

rose to the rank of sergeant, drew the following remark from abolitionist Thomas

Wentworth Higginson, the regiment’s white commander. “He makes Toussaint perfectly

intelligible; and if there should ever be a black monarchy in South Carolina, he will be its

king.”48 The regiment in which Rivers served likewise inspired historical references.

Scores of northern newspapers described the novelty of this early black regiment. One

writer was impressed with what he saw: “a row of strong, sturdy negroes, averaging from

21 to 30 years in age, and 5 feet 8 inches in height, clad in a decent military uniform of

dark blue, wearing felt hats, and armed with rifles of Belgian manufacture, and bayonets,

that which they handled as promptly and dexterously in obedience to the word of

command as one could wish to see—as well as any equal number of white men, not

especially selected, could have done.” The correspondent “noticed a look of honest

endeavor in their black faces indicative of an earnest desire to learn, their docility of

character rendering them apt pupils.” Their success at drilling was remarkable. The

47 “Visit to the Twenty-Ninth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers,”Weekly Anglo-African, 13 February 1864. 48 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in A Black Regiment and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 44.

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spectacle reminded the writer of other New York regiments he had seen, and that “also,

Toussaint was a negro.”49

Abolitionists even painted white officers of black troops with Toussaintian

brushes. Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas was such a man. An exceptional soldier with

a tendency to drink in excess, Thomas ranks among the army’s staunchest advocates of

black soldiery. In March 1863, he relocated to the Lower Mississippi Valley to recruit

slaves, and within a year oversaw the enlistment of more than twenty thousand.50 The

Chicago Tribune labeled Thomas “a champion of the black troops,” a man who had

“done more to raise black regiments than any one man in the country, or perhaps the

world, if we except Toussaint.”51 A writer in the New York Times calling himself

“Toussaint,” detailed an interview with Thomas as the latter convalesced following a

bought with fever brought on by exhaustion. “Toussaint” revealed an officer who worked

for the arming, education, and equal treatment of black soldiers, and arrested and

imprisoned those in the Army who opposed such policies. Thomas admired black men,

and thus earned the respect of this American Toussaint.52 David Hunter also believed in

arming slaves, and as early as 1862 began organizing black troops in defiance of official

government policy. Seeking an explanation for Hunter’s zealousness, The National Anti-

Slavery Standard insisted that it was the memory of Toussaint, “one of the greatest

military heroes that ever appeared in connection with the history of this continent,” which

served as Hunter’s inspiration.53 Not all military leaders were as esteemed as Thomas and

Hunter. Northern abolitionists disparaged high-ranking officers for failing to live up to

49 “A Sunday at Port Royal,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 26 July 1862. 50 Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War, 198. 51 “The Slaves of Maryland,”Chicago Tribune, 18 September 1863. 52 “Conversation with Gen. Thomas,”New York Times, 20 July 1863. 53 “Capacity of Blacks,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 20 September 1862.

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the high military standard set by Toussaint. James Redpath insisted that even the Union’s

greatest generals were incomparable. “As a soldier, diplomatist and ruler, he [Toussaint]

has never been equaled either in North or South America. Grant or Sherman may

possibly be his [Toussaint’s] equals as mere soldiers; but they have given no indication

yet, either one or them, that they could have coped with the First of the Blacks in the

other fields of triumphs.”54 The Massachusetts abolitionist and Union officer Benjamin

Butler chided Confederates who used deception, which caused Union troops to fire “upon

their friends.” A similar strategy was used “by Toussaint L’Ouverture toward the French

forces in San Domingo,” Butler wrote, “and would seem therefore to be not even

original.”55

Abolitionists saw Toussaint in the clothes as well as the bodies of both black men

and their white officers. The uniform of ordinary soldiers was enough to cause some

writers to invoke the Haitian Revolution. Nothing better illustrates the rage militaire that

swept the North during the Civil War then the wearing of the colorful and gaudy Zouave

uniforms, and the performance of the eccentric Zouave drill. Thousands of black and

white Union soldiers donned the baggy red trousers, fluffy white shirt, and small fez,

which mimicked the livery of the colonial French Army in North Africa. The black

radical abolitionist Martin Delany traced both the uniforms and drill to Haiti and credited

Toussaint with the birth of the tradition.”56 Prior to the Civil War, Delany emerged as a

leading proponent of black emigration, but during the war he became an outspoken

advocate of black soldiery. He pursued the organization of a regiment of black Zouaves, a

“corps d’Affique,” which would wear the Algerian-style uniforms and adopt the Algerian

54 “Toussaint L’Ouverture,”Commonwealth, 9 June 1866. 55 O.R. I, 15, 566. 56 “Haytian Ideas Adopted in America,”Pine and Palm, 5 June 1862.

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fighting style, which he insisted the original Algerian Zouaves copied from Haiti’s

revolutionary army.57 Delany wrote, “It was observed years ago by persons visiting

Hayti, without their comprehending it closely, perhaps, that the soldiers of that island had

peculiar tactics . .. this was, doubtless, nothing but the original Zouave tactics introduced

long years ago by native Africans among these people.”58 Others, like W. G. Smith of the

Pine and Palm, and abolitionist Franklin Sanborn, credited Toussaint specifically with

the Zouve drill.59 First in Africa, then in Haiti, and now finally in the United States,

soldiers of the African Diaspora donned the Zouave uniform and battled for freedom.

Delany noticed a commonality among Haitian and American slaves, and

recognized the opportunities the Civil War presented African Americans.60 The war made

it possible for black men to live up to the high standard of black soldiery demonstrated on

Haiti. Delany wanted African American soldiers to reenact the Haitian Revolution,

liberating slaves under the direction of black officers, while destroying an army of

slaveowners. He presented such a plan to Abraham Lincoln in February 1863. “I propose,

sir,” Delany remembered saying, “an army of blacks, commanded entirely by black

officers, except such whites as may volunteer to serve; this army to penetrate the heart of

the South, and make conquests, with the banner of emancipation unfurled, proclaiming

57 Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 86. 58 Frank A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin Delany: Sub-Assistant Commissioner Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and of Abandoned Lands, and Late Major 104th United States Colored Troops (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1883; reprint, New York: Amo Press, 1969), 143. 59 “Haytian Ideas Adopted in America,”Pine and Palm 5 June 1862; “A Sermon Preached at Music Hall, March 31, 1861 by F. B. Sanbom, Supplement to the Weekly Anglo-African,” 20 April 1861. 60 Delany, who is often referred to as the father of Black Nationalism, came to appreciate Haiti during the Civil War more than previously. While in the 1850s thousands of African Americans preferred Haiti over alternative sites as a location for colonization, Delany steadfastly preferred West Africa. Nonetheless, during the Civil War, he announced in front of the United States Congress that Haiti was “peopled by as brave and noble descendants of Africa as they who laid the foundation of Thebias, or constructed the everlasting pyramids and catacombs of Egypt— a people who freed themselves by the might of their own will, the force of their own right arms, and their unflinching determination to be free.” Sterling Stuckey, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 205.

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freedom as they go, sustaining and protecting it by arming the emancipated, taking them

as fresh troops, and leaving a few veterans among the new freedmen, when occasion

requires, keeping this banner unfurled until every slave is free, according to the letter of

your proclamation.”61 Lincoln’s response, according to Delany, was more than

satisfactory. “This,” replied the president, “is the very thing I have been looking and

hoping for; but nobody offered it.”62 After agreeing to the organization of such a force,

Lincoln commissioned Delany a Major, making him the first commissioned black officer

in the United States Army. Lincoln then ordered the black officer to South Carolina to

begin organizing.63

In the last months of the war, Delany posed for a photograph in full military

regalia. Given the unique opportunity of a black man posing in the uniform of an officer

of the United States Army, Delany seized the moment. The image quickly found its way

onto a carte-de-viste, which abolitionists peddled for twenty-five cents apiece.64 The

similarities between this print and what was the most popular image of Toussaint in the

nineteenth century are unmistakable (Figures 5.1 and 5.2).65 Both Toussaint and Delany

61 Robert S. Levine,Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 222. 62 Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin Delany, 169; Delany’s positive response from Lincoln maybe the result of selective memory. Nell Irvin Painter posits leading African Americans, including Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, reported being respectfully received by the president, for “When Lincoln patronized them, he violated Truth and Douglass’s self-presentation as people commanding respect.” Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 207. 63 Up to this point, Delany had served in the 104th United States Colored Troops as a recruiter and medical officer. Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 74. 64 “Special Notices. Maj. Martin Delany, U.S.A.,”Weekly Anglo-African, 19 August 1865. 65 The engraving appeared originally in British Army Officer Marcus Rainsford’s history of the Haitian Revolution. A reproduction then appeared in thePenny Magazine, as well as Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s Peter Parley’s Pictoral History of North and South America (Hartford, Connecticut: Peter Parley Publishing Company, 1858), 180; Rainsford,An Historical Account of the Black Empire ofHayti: Comprehending a View of the Principal Transactions in the Revolution o f Saint Domingo; with Its Antient and Modern State (London: Albion Press, 1805); [Harriet Martineau], “Account of Toussaint Louverture,” Monthly Supplement o f The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 1 (February 28 to March 31, 1838): 121; William Jackson published Charles Knight’sPenny Magazine in

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stand erect, with their eyes focused directly on the camera. The black and white image

accentuates their dark skin. There is no denying their blackness. Both hold a sword in

their right hand that extends to the ground, touching the earth in front of their right foot;

both don cockaded, black campaign hats; both wear sashes with two tassles that fall to the

ground, one farther than the other. Martin’s Delany’s dream had come true: the Civil War

had become a war to end slavery; black men were taking part in a Second Haitian

Revolution; and he was an American Toussaint.

Figure 5.1: Marcus Rainsford, Historical Figure 5.2: Joseph T. Wilson, Account o f the Black Empire o f Hayti, 1805 Black Phalanx, 1890

New York. The magazine was England’s most widely read periodical, known especially for its illustrations. Scott Bennett calls the magazine “the first mass-market periodical published in Britain,” and records its average annual circulation at 187,000. “The Editorial Character and ReadershipThe of Penny Magazine-. An Analysis,”Victorian Periodical Review, 17 (1984): 127-28.

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It was one thing for northern abolitionists to draw comparisons between American

and Haitian slaves, and another for American slaves to do it themselves, given the

widespread fears of a repetition of the “Horrors of St. Domingo.” There is no more telling

example of the survival of public memory of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution during

the Civil War than the evidence of fugitive slaves, or contrabands, who after escaping

behind Union lines, in interviews and conversations, revealed a detailed knowledge of the

great Slave Soldier and the successful slave revolt that occurred decades earlier and many

miles away. Such evidence demonstrates that slaves were not transparent, unintelligent,

and uninformed people; rather, they were informed and active participants in their own

history, conscious participants in a black Atlantic revolutionary tradition.

There were two main sources of African American memory of the Haitian

Revolution in the South during the Civil War. The first was print culture. Scholars of the

book note the extent to which popular northern periodicals found a market among a

southern reading audience in spite of the war.66 Stephanie Camp, for example, documents

the case of one Mississippi slave who hung a picture of Abraham Lincoln, which she

detached from a northern abolitionist newspaper, on the walls of her cabin.67 Black

soldiers and slaves in the South accessed northern antislavery newspapers and periodicals

that provided detailed information on Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution. For

evidence, we simply need to refer to those media who during the war proudly offered

proof of their southern distribution. In June 1863, The Liberator printed a letter from a

Chaplain with the Thirty-Third Massachusetts Regiment, who listed the sheets he

66 Alice Fahs,The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature o f the North and South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); David Kaser,Books and Libraries in Camp and Battle: The Civil War Experience (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Prison, 1984). 67 Stephanie M. H. Camp,Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 114-16.

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received weekly in the mail. Along with The Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery

Standard, he also recorded the staunchly abolitionist Boston Commonwealth and Boston

Transcript. The chaplain distributed all of these papers “among the men, who read them

eagerly.”68 In the Commonwealth, another chaplain commented on the reading habits of

black soldiers in the South. “Probably there never was such an anxiety to learn to read

and write as there is now in the colored regiments.” The soldiers routinely requested

spelling books from the chaplain. Low supplies, however, forced the chaplain to deny

these requests, writing, “It mortifies me exceedingly, especially when I know how many

second-hand spelling-books are lying about through the country, for which there is no

use. I occasionally run off a few days, and ransack all the benevolent institutions that can

spare a book or primer, besides the thousands of papers, tracts, and periodicals which I

weekly procure for those who can read, and the weekly packages of [ Christian]

Recorders and Anglo-AfricansC These materials did not satisfy the men, who then

clamored for hymn-books and Bibles. Then‘‘‘‘Christian Advocate, New York Independent,

Boston Commonwealth, Anti-Slavery Standard, etc.,” the Chaplain continued, “come in a

general cry from every direction, until several hundred are gone.”69 An enslaved minister,

who was asked about the availability of northern publications among slaves during the

war, admitted that his reading was normally limited to southern newspapers. Yet, he

added, “they used to have pieces taken out of Northern papers, that were friendly to us,

and these I used to read and tell my friends about.”70 A southern correspondent in the

Weekly Anglo-African asked, “Will they not send us copies of The Anglo? There are a

great many colored soldiers here and they all desire to have The Anglo-African. Your

68 “Letter from Reverend Daniel Forster,”Liberator, 12 June 1863. 69 “The Freedmen. Education Among the Colored Soldiers,”Commonwealth, 5 November 1864. 70 “The South and the Negro,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 9 September 1865.

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humble servant gets a copy pretty regularly, but it is worn into pieces before a hundreth

part of the boys get through reading it.” 71

The Confederate army failed to stop the advance of both the Union Army and

northern print culture. A South Carolinian slave named John was among the first

contrabands to reveal firsthand knowledge of Haiti.72 John confessed his knowledge of

the political events swirling around him, and revealed, for example, that he knew of John

Brown and had read stories of the white martyr “to heaps of the colored people.” He

revealed further that he had in his possession a “history of San Domingo,” which he

stored away in his trunk. That a slave counted a narrative of the Haitian Revolution

among his personal possessions is notable, as historians are just beginning to understand

the extent to which slaves’ networks of communication extended beyond plantation

boundaries. Through seaports and sailors, word-of-mouth communication, and hand-to-

hand exchanges of printed matter, information from the North and the greater Atlantic

world penetrated America’s slave society.73 James M. Simms’s career as a publisher

provides an example. A former slave and Union soldier, Simms published an edition of

William Wells Brown’s Black Man in Charleston, South Carolina in 1865. It is according

to Phillip Lapsansky, “the first book written by a black, celebrating black

accomplishment, published by a black in the New South—or the Old.”74 A surviving

copy of this unique volume belonged to the free black South Carolinian merchant,

Anthony Desvemey. That black southerners published, distributed, and read a book

71 Weekly Anglo-African, 26 March 1864. 72 “The Army and the Negroes,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 8 November 1862. 73 Bolster, Black Jacks', Scott III, Common Wind', Horton and Horton, In Hope of Liberty, 74 My thanks to Phillip Lapsansky at the Library Company o f Philadelphia for bringing the story of this edition to my attention. “Affo-Americana,”The Annual Report of the Library Company of Philadelphia (1989), 1989.

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written by a radical black northern abolitionist, which gloried in the accomplishments of

Toussaint and other Haitian revolutionaries, speaks to both the transforming nature of the

Civil War and the reach of northern print culture. It testifies, moreover, to the resiliency

of public memory of the Haitian Revolution.

Slaves’ oral culture was the second major source of slaves’ collective memory of

Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution. A Union chaplain stationed for a time at Port

Royal, South Carolina claimed an intimate knowledge of slave thought, and thus felt that

they had the potential to make excellent fighting men. “From the earliest ages of the

world, the people from whom the contrabands of this country originally sprang, have

been a people of war.” Confident in his knowledge of slaves’ oral tradition, he continued.

“The result of the insurrection in St. Domingo has long been known among the

contrabands of the South—the name of Toussaint L’Overture has been passed from

mouth to mouth until it has become a secret household word—and a love of liberty, fed

by a love of arms, has been rendered universal and almost omnipotent. It has been felt

that it was right for the colored Haytiens to fight to be free, it is equally right for colored

Americans.” This was a bold statement. For years slaveowners insisted that the

bondspeople were neither deserving nor eager for freedom, but in his short time in South

Carolina Dennison had learned of the contrabands “secret household word.” He reasoned

that if southern planters had failed to keep slaves ignorant to the legacy of Toussaint and

the Haitian Revolution, then surely they had not extinguished the black man’s martial

spirit as well. Southerners had underestimated the martial spirit of southern slaves,

descendants of “a people of war.”75 Commenting on the patriotism of African Americans

75 “Will The Contrabands Fight,”Washington National Republican, in Weekly Anglo-African, 15 February 1862.

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in the District of Columbia, a correspondent of the New York Evening Post added that

black men studied the military tactics and strategies of both the present war and ancient

history. “They think and speak of General Hannibal as one of their own immortal heroes.

The brave deeds of Toussaint L’Ouverture, of Cristophe, Rigaud and Gefffard abroad, of

Attucks and Turner at home, are as familiar to these people as households words.” ??76

These assertions echoed the language used by John Brown Jr., who on the eve of the war,

in an open letter to the President of Haiti published in the New York Times, insisted that

Toussaint’s memory survived on the tongues of American slaves.”77

Further evidence of the survival of public memory of Toussaint and the Haitian

Revolution in slaves’ oral culture comes from aged contrabands who through

autobiographical memory claimed to have survived the Haitian Revolution. Eyewitnesses

to both the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War, their stories emphasize the

commonalities of the two events. An elderly man named Launace at Port Royal, South

Carolina claimed a remarkable history. A correspondent from the New York Tribune

called him “by far the most interesting contraband of whom any account has yet been

given men, but I have been able to gather only enough to excite rather than to gratify

curiosity. He is more than 75 years old, came or was brought from St. Domingo, where

he was free, and where, for six years, he served in what are called the revolutionary

wars.” Launace’s legend grew when it was revealed, “He knew Toussaint, Cristophe, and

no Petion, and has many interesting stories of those men still fresh in his memory.” A slave

at the Union Army’s contraband camp in Beaufort, North Carolina was “said by the

people who know him to be one hundred and seven years old.” The man’s name was

76 “Colored People of the District of Colombia,”Weekly Anglo-African, 19 April 1862. 77 “The Haytiens and John Brown,”New York Times, 8 August 1860. 78 “The Contrabands at Port Royal,”Liberator, 20 December 1861.

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Lawrence Slade, and he lived in Newbem, North Carolina for more than seventy years.

The National Anti-Slavery Standard reported, “He has seen his master flourish and fade

down to the third and fourth generations; has lived through seven wars and scenes of

bloodshed, and says he has never before seen a war like this; has never seen a sick day;

was at St. Domingo, at the time of the slave insurrection and massacre.” 70

Septuagenarian and South Carolina, Sea Islander Norice Wilkinson claimed to have

fought in Toussaint’s army. Though more than a-half century removed from the Haitian

Revolution, he remembered much of Toussaint, including his home, his horse, and his

attire. An abolitionist working in South Carolina forwarded two ambrotypes of the former

Haitian soldier to Wendell Phillips, writing, “I take the liberty of sending you two

pictures of an old man now residing on Hilton Head island, whose life has a strange

OA historical interest.” The Weekly Anglo-African carried a story of a group of “colored

exiles” in Charleston, South Carolina who planned to sail for Haiti. These were no

ordinary contrabands. “There are among them descendents of exiles from Hayti during

O I her Revolution of 1789! ” They were finally going home.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of these reports. They share an aura of

implausibility, and like many stories of the survivors of the Age of Revolution that

appeared in American print culture throughout the nineteenth century, seem to lack

authenticity.• * 82 That slaves who experienced the Haitian Revolution first-hand were alive

79 “An Aged Negro,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 27 June 1863. 80 Irving Bartlett,Wendell and Ann Phillips: The Community o f Reform (New York: Norton, 1979), 131. 81 Weekly Anglo-African, 30 March 1861. 82 Civil War newspapers are filled with the accounts of survivors of the American Revolution. For example, see “Nimium Ne Crede Colori,”Liberator, 9 October 1863. An example of a contraband claiming to remember George Washington, see: “About Contrabands,”Weekly Anglo-African, 24 January 1863. For a discussion of the tradition, see: Reiss, Showman and the Slave-, AlffedYoung, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999);Masquerade: The Life and Times o f Deborah Sampson Gannett, Continental Soldier (New York: Random House, 2004).

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among fugitive American slaves during the Civil War seems improbable. That Launace

and Norice knew Toussaint is unlikely. Nonetheless, we must evaluate their claims

carefully. Thousands of white, colored, and black Haitians migrated to the United States

throughout the duration of the Haitian Revolution and after. In most cases, they traveled

to southern Seaports, with New Orleans, Charleston, Norfolk, and Baltimore among the

O’) most common destinations. Given the reported ages of these refugees, it is indeed

possible that they had seen the Haitian Revolution and lived to tell about it more than

fifty years later. Moreover, the veracity of these stories may have mattered little to

readers. To them the Haitian Revolution was a recent event, not nearly as distant as has

been generally conceded. Americans during the Civil War were only a generation or two

removed from the Haitian Revolution. That black Haitian refugees survived among

fugitive slaves is likely.

Events in a number of slave states illuminate how contrabands further contributed

to the revival of public memory of the Haitian Revolution during the Civil War. In 1863,

a correspondent of the New York Herald noted a unique occurrence at Newbem, North

Carolina. There an estimated eight to ten thousand contrabands established a colony and

gave it the name, “New Hayti.”84 In Alexandria, Virginia, Freedmen likewise poured into

a black settlement, which residents had for decades referred to as “Hayti.” A few blocks

away, they constructed a medical facility that eventually served hundreds of black

soldiers and contrabands. This they named “L’Ouverture Branch Hospital.”85 The naming

83 The best synthesis of Haitian refugees to America remains Alfred Hunt,H aiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), Chapter Two. A more recent account is Ashli White, “ ‘A Flood of Impure Lava’: Saint Domingue Refugees in the United States, 1791-1820,” Ph.D. diss., Colombia University, 2003. 84 “The Government and the Negroes,”New York Herald, 6 January 1863. 85 Ira Berlin, ed., Joseph P. Reidy and Leslie S. Rowland, associate eds.,The Black Military Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 652 and 683.

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of important spaces after the Haitian Revolution was a tradition established earlier in the

century. Before the Civil War, African Americans named their communities in honor of

the black republic. In the South alone, there were “Haytis” in Arkansas, Maryland,

Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia. The origin of these names is in every case

obscure, as they were usually known only to black residents who kept them alive through

oral tradition. The names do not appear on nineteenth century maps. In at least one case,

however, the source of the name is traceable. In Rockville, Maryland antebellum free

blacks called their neighborhood “Haiti,” which they pronounced “Hay-tie.” One of the

community’s founders was Samuel Martin, Jr. Bom a slave in 1800 and eventually freed

by 1842, he was likely a descendent of Honore Martin, a Saint Domingan planter and

migrant to Rockville.86

Individual naming practices provide additional evidence of the survival of the

memory of the Haitian Revolution among African Americans. The naming of children in

honor of Haiti’s founding father was a longstanding tradition. Martin Delany’s son

Toussaint Louverture Delany offers a well-known example. Toussaint L’Ouverture

Lambert’s name is less known. The descendant of a Detroit-based conductor on the

Underground Railroad who assisted John Brown in the planning of his raid at Harper’s

Ferry, Lambert worked as a correspondent to the Weekly Anglo-African. His signature, or

the abbreviation, “T. L’O. L.,” appears routinely in the paper during the war.87 Lambert

was not the only black abolitionist who capitalized on Toussaint’s name in the northern

86 Eileen McGuckian,Rockville: Portrait of a City (Franklin, Tennessee: Hillsboro Press, 2001), 34, 62; McGuckian, unpublished memo, “Honore Martin of Rockville, Maryland,” and “Honore Martin,” Peerless Rockville Vertical Files. 87 African Americans routinely spelled Toussaint’s name “Touissant,” as a cursory glance at antebellum black newspapers reveals. “William Lambert,”Detroit Free Press, 29 April 1890; Ulysses W. Boykin,A Hand Book on the Detroit Negro (Detroit: The Minority Study Associates, 1943), 117.

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press. The Weekly Anglo-African and the New York Times also published letters of

correspondents calling themselves either “Toussaint” or “L’Ouverture.” It is clear that

African Americans had a special place in their hearts and minds for Toussaint, yet he did

not have a monopoly on African American memory. John Mercer Langston, the Virginia-

born abolitionist and orator who lectured on the Haitian Revolution, for example, named

his eldest son Dessalines.88 During the Civil War, African Americans continued this

naming tradition. Boston Toussaint Parsons, the noted Virginia educator, politician, and

church leader, was bom in Currituck, County, North Carolina six months after the firing

on Fort Sumter.89 Two years later in Oxford, Ohio, Hezikiah and Carolina Jackson named

their son, who would go on to found the first African-American settlement in Colorado,

Oliver Toussaint Jackson.90 Scholars trace the centrality of African American naming

practices to the naming ceremonies of West Africa. West Africans placed great

importance on names, and recognized them as key indicators of one’s past, kinship, and

identity. Consequently, historians consider African American naming customs as

essentially African, or nationalist in nature, as opposed to American, or integrationist.91

They insist upon this even when African Americans chose Anglicized names instead of

88 Langston named his son, Arthur Dessalines Langston.Langston From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capital, or, The First and Only Negro Representative in Congress from the Old Dominion (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1894; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint co., 1969.), 157. 88 Brown,St. Domingo, 36. 89 James Harvey Anderson,Biographical Souvenir Volume o f the Twenty-Third Quadrennial Session o f the General Conference o f the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (Philadelphia: Big Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church, 1908), 138-39. 90 Frank Lincoln Mather, Who’s Who of the Colored Race, vol. 1 (Chicago: F. L. Mather, 1915), 150-51. 91 From Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa), to Frederick Douglass (Bailey) and Sojourner Truth (Isabella), to Malcolm X (Little) and Martin Luther (Michael) King, Jr., the naming practices of African Americans signify an important moment in life and especially the transition from slavery to freedom, and adolescence to adulthood. John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South Revised and Enlarged Edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 181-83; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 194-98.

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African names. But the decision of African Americans to name their children after Haiti’s

revolutionary leaders indicates a transatlantic consciousness, which defies the traditional

nationalist/integrationist paradigm of African-American identity. In the middle of the

nineteenth century, African Americans were part of a culture that was neither African nor

American. They, instead, occupied the middle ground between these two poles, immersed

in a black Atlantic tradition that defied national, political, and temporal boundaries.92

American Toussaints served as central characters in some of the most popular

literature published during the Civil War. In Camps and Prisons: Twenty Months in the

Department o f the Gulf, a fictional account of Union officer and one-time prisoner of war

Augustine Duganne’s experiences in Louisiana during the war, a fugitive slave named

Toussaint figured prominently. Like his namesake, this American Toussaint was

“courageous and intelligent, strong and patient, who might ask only favorable

surroundings to become, likewise, a chief of his enfranchised comrades.” In escaping

behind Union lines, Toussaint “dared to defy oppression and brave suffering, from the

promptings of as generous a spirit as that which nerved his namesake in Hayti.” Once

after being lashed by an overseer’s whip, Toussaint’s “manhood revolted once more,”

and he struck the overseer and then absconded from the plantation on a horse. This was

not wanton violence. It was self-defense in the pursuit of freedom. While escaping on

horseback, Toussaint was “struck by a bullet in his shoulder.” Still, he did not submit. He

headed for the woods and eventually found refuge in the Union army. When asked to stop

working in order to let his wound heal Toussaint responded to a white soldier, “Thank

you, sah! But I reck’n it’ll git along, sah! I’d rather wu’k, sah, if you please, sah!” The

92 Paul Gilroy,The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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slave who refused to stop working because of a bullet wound impressed Duganne. “I do

not know many white soldiers who would not prefer a furlough under Toussaint’s

circumstances. Very few, certainly, would report for fatigue duty, with a bullet hole

through the shoulder.”93 Here was an American Toussaint achieving freedom through

violence, while at the same time assisting the Union cause. For readers who tried to live

the war vicariously, it was as though this black rebel had come from another place and

time.94

The controversial name of an American Toussaint living in Louisiana sparked a

melee that ended in murder in Stephen G. Bulfmch’s historical novel, Honor; or, The

Slave-Dealer’s Daughter. In the story, a northern traveler named Frederick Bryant

informs a New Orleans slave named Toussaint of the history behind his name. “They

named you after the greatest man of your race, and one of its best men too, I fancy.”

Toussaint “led the slaves of St. Domingo in an insurrection against the whites; and the

whites afterwards took him prisoner, and carried him to a cold country, where they kept

him shut up in a very cold, damp prison, till he died.” This American Toussaint knew

little of his namesake, yet the conversation led him to wonder aloud: “Maybe massa’d

stand by de brack men now, if dey’d make a resurrection, jes’ like in Samingo.” Upon

hearing this remark, Bryant quickly ended the conversation for fear that other whites

might overhear the exchange. He was fully aware that he was not in the North anymore.

Toussaint’s newfound knowledge led him to broach the topics of Haiti and insurrection

93 A. J. H. Duganne, Camps and Prisons: Twenty Months in the Department of the Gulf (New York: J.P. Robens, Publisher, 1865), 92-94. 94 For a description of how, in spite of their distance from the physical war, ordinary men and women came to imagine themselves as active participants in the Civil War, ones who shared fully in the joy, despair, guilt, and anguish that the war evoked among those who experienced it first-hand, see Charles Royster,The Destructive War (New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), Chapter Six.

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with other slaves, and local whites took notice. Lynch mobs formed to punish Bryant’s

indiscretion, and after a short battle, the father of Bryant’s love interest stood charged

with murder. A jury eventually found John Witham not guilty of murder, based on a

tenuous southern law that sanctioned mob violence, but the moral of the story was clear.95

Slaves who remembered Toussaint also had a significant role in popular wartime

fiction. Among the Pines: or South in Secession Time, a best-selling novel by James

Gilmore, tells the story of a slave named Scipio who the author found “in every way . . . a

remarkable negro, and my three days’ acquaintance with him banished from my mind all

doubt as to the capacity of the black for freedom, and all question as to the disposition of

the slave to strike off his chains when the favorable moment arrives.” Scipio taught

Gilmore that “blacks, though pretending ignorance, are fully acquainted with the

questions at issue in the pending contest.” Scipio acknowledged that white southerners

were fighting men, and that the North would be in for a fight, but he predicted that the

Confederacy could never beat the North, “cause you see dey’ll fight wid only one hand.

When dey fight de Norf wid de right hand, dey ’11 have to hold de nigga wid de leffT

Taken aback, Gilmore pursued this line of thought. “But the black won’t rise; most of

you have kind masters and fare well.” To this Scipio responded, “Dat’s true, massa, but

dat an’t freedom, and de black lub freedom as much as de white . . . De blacks hab strong

hands, and when de day come you’ll see dey hab heads, too!” Scipio described some of

the events that would have to take place in order for an inevitable black rebellion in South

Carolina to come about. Gilmore responded, “but you have no leaders, no one to direct

the movement. Your race is not a match for the white in generalship, and without

95 Stephen G. Bulfinch, Honor; or, The Slave-Dealer’s Daughter (Boston: William V. Spence, 1864), 122- 24, 131-34, 204-29.

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generals, whatever your number, you would fare hardly.” Scipio retorted, “I knows most

ob de great men, like Washington and John and James and Paul, and dem ole fellers war

white, but dar was Two Sand (Toussaint l’Ouverture), de Brack Douglass, and de Nigga

Demus (Nicodemus), dey war black.” 96

A slave in the heart of the Confederacy invoked Toussaint at the same time he

discussed the inevitability of a slave insurrection in the South. It is an extraordinary

passage; and northerners took notice. The North American Review printed a twelve-page

review of Gilmore’s book, including the conversation with Scipio in its entirety. Q7 The

veracity of Gilmore’s work is disputable. Alice Fahs notes that Gilmore’s work shared

“an uncanny resemblance to the editorial pages of the [Continental] Monthly, ” and then

cites one of the author’s contemporaries who called Among the Pines ‘pure fiction from

QO beginning to end.” Yet Fahs cites a critic in Charleston, South Carolina. White

southerners categorically rejected northern antislavery literature like Uncle Tom’s Cabin,

which promised to tell the real story of the South and slavery. Gilmore, unlike Stowe,

traveled extensively in the South and encountered slaves. He did this during a war that

sparked an unprecedented level of slave resistance and rebellion, as countless slaves

walked off plantations seeking both liberty and Union muskets.99 Northerners gave

96 Edmund Kirke [James R. Gilmore],Among the Pines: or South in Secession Time (New York: J.R. Gilmore, 1862), 19-21. In the summer of 1863, Americans bought more than 30,000 copies ofAmong the Pines, which first appeared as a serial in the Continental Monthly. Writing under the pen name of Edmund Kirke, James Gilmore assured readers of the veracity of his work, promising only a “record of facts.” He continued, “the characters I have introduced are real. They are not drawn with the pencil of fancy, nor, I trust, colored with the tints of prejudice. The scenes I have described are true,” 33. Northern critics hailed Among the Pines as “one of the most readable books of Southern life we have ever seen,” and “a striking and truthful portraiture of slave society.” Kirk,My Southern Friends (New York: Carleton, 1863), advertisement. 97 “Among the Pines: or South in Secession Time,”North American Review, XCV, no. 197 (October 1862): 534-545. 98 Fahs,Imagined Civil War, 160. 99 The best account of slave resistance during the war is Leon F. Litwack,Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1980).

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Gilmore the benefit of the doubt. In praising the literary qualities of the book, a reviewer

posited, “the work is not only not a regular novel, but we are assured there is absolutely

nothing fictitious in it.” Still, the authenticity of Gilmore’s account matters less than its

popularity. Something in the story of a runaway slave appealed to the more than 30,000

men and women who purchased the book soon after its publication and the tens of

thousands of people who read excerpted passages in popular periodicals. We do not know

if Abraham Lincoln was familiar with the book; he never recorded an opinion of it. Yet it

is likely he was familiar with the piece, for during the war Gilmore visited with the

President frequently, becoming a close counselor on issues of social and public policy.100

In the South, both the name and memory of Toussaint were incendiary devices

that threatened to topple the columns on which this slave society rested. This was a fact

that some slaves clearly understood. In a “remarkable conversation” with Samuel

Wilkeson of the New York Tribune, “an intelligent negro” named Tom, who had runaway

from his master in South Carolina with the hopes of enlisting in the Union Army, took

offense at the suggestion that American slaves were unwilling to fight for freedom. “You

know as well as I,” Tom declared:

We were driven from your lines and camps, and pretty plainly told that you didn’t want anything to do with us; that you meant to carry on the war, and leave us in slavery at the end of the war . . . The North can’t conquer the South without the help of the slaves . . . We know, too, that if the war lasts, one party or the other party will give us our freedom.

Hardly believing what he had heard, Wilkeson retorted: “What is that you say—the

slaveholders free the slaves?” Tom fired back:

They certainly will do it, if they can’t whip you otherwise . .. Our position Mr. W. is like that of San Domingo blacks. They put their aid in the market between

100 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 767-68; Carl Sandburg,Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years. One Volume Edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954), 419, 423-24,431, 535.

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the white and the mulattoes—put it for sale. The price was their freedom. We mean to sell ourselves for freedom . . . If your politicians and Generals kick us away, we will try to make our market with the rebels. But you had better bargain with us—had better free us, and arm us.101

The exchange is indeed remarkable. Tom expressed a detailed, historical consciousness

of the Haitian Revolution, knowledge not limited to the symbolism of a black slave

uprising. To the contrary, he expressed an awareness of the complex of race on Haiti that

pit black slaves, white planters, poor whites, and a free mulatto class against, and

sometimes beside each other for thirteen years. Here is evidence of a black Atlantic

consciousness. Tom placed his allegiance to freedom and his race first, and the Union

second. He wanted assurances that the 4,000,000 members of his race in chains would

benefit from the war before they would cast their lot with the Union army; and he dared

the North to try to win the war without them. Unlike the nonviolent and restrained Tom

of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, this Tom was a militant black man threatening to bring

another Haitian Revolution to the United States.

When black men put on the uniform of the United States Army and went to war to

be free, they and their white allies recognized the similarities of the forces aligned against

them and those faced by Haitian slaves at the end of the eighteenth century. The

transformation of the Civil War from a limited war over Union to a total war over slavery

meant that the time to finish the struggle begun on the small French colony in the

Caribbean decades before had finally arrived. Heeding the clarion call to arms that had

reverberated throughout the Atlantic world for centuries, African Americans proved

themselves worthy of the freedom they demanded, by living up to the high standard of

black soldiery set by Toussaint and his slave army. Their accomplishments on the

101 “An Intelligent Contraband,”Commonwealth, 8 November 1862; “Views of an Intelligent Negro,” Douglass’ Monthly, January 1863.

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battlefield perhaps surpassed those of their Haitian counterparts, for black Union soldiers

avoided partaking in the excesses that accompanied the earlier revolution over slavery.

Seizing upon the Heroic Model of the Haitian Revolution and taking advantage of the

opportunities presented by the Civil War, black soldiers ultimately finished what others

like them had started on Haiti more than a half-century before.

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EMANCIPATION AND THE SECOND HAITIAN REVOLUTION

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“HAS THE STORY NO LESSON FOR US?”: HAITI AND THE REINVENTING

OF AMERICA

In the opening years of the Civil War, abolitionists contended that the Haitian

Revolution taught two valuable lessons regarding the eventual end of slavery in the

United States. First, that the alternative to emancipation was slave insurrection.

Abolitionists asserted that Americans slaves were only waiting for the perfect opportunity

to rise up in unison as slaves had done on Haiti more than a-half century earlier. Every

day that the Civil War continued, the likelihood of a violent slave revolution increased.

Thus, the alternative to slave insurrection was emancipation. Second, that the state of war

gave the federal government the legal authority to emancipate the men and women held

as slaves by the enemy. The precedent for such an action occurred in 1793 when the

French government declared the slaves of Saint Domingue free by governmental

proclamation. Convinced of these two principles, abolitionists set out to convince the

American people, the federal government, and the Commander in Chief of the right of

emancipation. In public orations and printed texts, they deployed the oppositional models

of the Haitian Revolution as proof of both the benefits of abolition and the horrors of

racial conflict that were likely to take place if slavery survived the war.

169

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This chapter begins with a look at the period between the bombardment of Fort

Sumter and the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, when abolitionists deployed

the narrative of the Haitian Revolution in speeches and texts to make the Civil War a war

over slavery. It then moves to a discussion of the iconography of Toussaint that

accompanied the debate over emancipation. That a rebel black slave’s memory

reverberated beyond the borders of his native country more than five decades after his

death illuminates the depth of the shadow that the revolutionary history and memory of

the Haitian Revolution cast over the Atlantic world. Public memory of Toussaint was part

and parcel of the abolitionist argument to remake the United States into a nation without

slavery. It was widely known that under his leadership nearly a-half million recently

freed slaves returned to their plantations, cultivated crops, and refrained from committing

acts of vengeance upon their white neighbors. Based on this history, abolitionists

promised nothing less of emancipated American slaves. Though they did not expect them

to equal Toussaint’s greatness, they believed that most could emulate the anonymous

Haitian slaves who prospered under this authority. The chapter concludes with a review

of the myriad ways the Haitian Revolution figured in abolitionists’ ideas of life after

emancipation. Public memory of the Haitian Revolution shaped reformers ideas about

Reconstruction and the concomitant issues of black suffrage and civil rights. It is in this

context that the plasticity of the memory of the Haitian Revolution truly reveals itself.

The specter of a Second Haitian Revolution was one of the most potent weapons

in the abolitionist arsenal. Just days after the war commenced, a lecture by Francis

Sanborn at Boston’s Tremont Temple appeared as a full-page supplement in the Weekly

Anglo-African as well as in other abolitionist tracts. One of the masterminds behind John

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Brown’s raid, a man some still considered a fugitive from justice, Sanborn began, “I

propose to preach to you to-day on Emancipation, the only safe Compromise, enforcing

what I say by referring to the history and position of Hayti, the African Republic of the

Antilles.” Sanborn asked his audience whether they wished to see a Second Haitian

Revolution in the South. To avoid such a catastrophe, he argued, emancipation was

required. Without it, the South would receive “the dreadful punishment of St. Domingo.”

Sanborn insisted upon a nation without slavery, for if slavery continued, so did slave

resistance. “Emancipation or insurrection,” he avowed, were “the two alternatives.”

Sanbom reminded his listeners of the importance of history at this crucial time in the

nation’s history. “Read it, if you have the heart, in the sickening pages of St. Domingo’s

history.” Slavery inevitably meant a race war, one in which would lead to the

extermination of the “feebler white” race. “O my countrymen of the South!—brothers

still, though steeped in the defilement of your inherited sin—will you not listen to these

voices from the Past, from the graves of dead nations from the oracles of the living

God?” Sanbom offered Confederates an ultimatum: free your slaves, or face their wrath;

learn from the past, or repeat it.1 Republican Party leader George Boutwell delivered an

emotional speech in which he also called for the immediate abolition of slavery.

Anticipating the response of his critics, he asked, “ ‘What will you do . . . if you

emancipate the slaves?’ My friend, what will you do if you don’t?” He then invoked

Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson warned slaveowners that if they did nothing about slavery

than they would become the murderers of their own children. Boutwell thought these

were “Terribly prophetic words! Terrible in the possibility of their fulfillment!” Abolition

1 “Emancipation. A Sermon Preached at Music Hall, Boston. Supplement to the Weekly Anglo-African,” Weekly Anglo-African, 20 April 1861.

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was inevitable. Slaveowners would liberate their slaves peacefully, or slaves would take

their freedom violently. Boutwell asked Confederates if they preferred peaceful

emancipation, like that which took place in Jamaica, or the violent variety that occurred

on St. Domingo?

No abolitionist exploited the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution more

successfully than James Redpath, who asserted that emancipation did not cause the

“horrors of St. Domingo.” Slavery did. “Horrors o f St. Domingo! ” was a cry that had

“long been fraudulently used to excite the apprehensions of the ignorant and unthinking,

and to prejudice society against a measure just in itself, and imminently politic, as well as

humane.” Redpath admitted Haitian history was “stained with excesses equal in horror to

those which two years desolated France and terrified the world—excesses unequalled in

the sad catalogue of violence.” Yet two facts were obvious to those knowledgeable of

Haitian history. First, that for three centuries white planters subjected black slaves to “the

cruelest oppression and degradation that human ingenuity could devise, and unbridled

ferocity execute.” For three centuries, the wicked system of slavery planted and then

cultivated a “harvest of horrors.” Second, that the events that accompanied the

insurrection were a consequence of the persistent refusal of slaveowners to ameliorate the

wretched condition of the slaves. They were not the result of “the naturally ferocious

disposition of their long suffering, and hitherto submissive victims.” When the colony’s

slaves rose against the white population, “they were as merciful as their oppressors had

taught them to be.” Even so, they only partially repaid the cruel debt that had accrued

2 George Boutwell, “Emancipation: Its Justice, Expediency and Necessity, as the Means of Securing a Speedy and Permanent Peace. An Address Delivered by Hon. George Boutwell, in Tremont Temple, Boston, Under the Auspices of The Emancipation League, December 16, 1861,”Liberator, 20 December 61.

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over time. “They merely cancelled the interest, leaving the principal to be liquidated by

the impartial adjustment of God’s providence.” Redpath considered it “a strange

perversion of the teachings of history to cite the destructive effects of a vicious social

condition as a reason for its reproduction and maintenance.” The “Horrors o f St.

Domingo ” instead of proving the depravity of the black race, furnished the best argument

for the eradication of slavery.3

As abolitionists placed such a heavy emphasis on the Haitian Revolution to justify

emancipation, some felt obligated to explain some of the troubling events that

characterized its history. Exploiting Napoleon’s failed attempt to return slavery to Haiti,

they used his name as a touchstone, avowing that emancipation brought peace among the

black and white races—not war. That was Napoleon’s doing. William Lloyd Garrison

maintained that Haiti prospered in the wake of emancipation, until Napoleon attempted to

restore slavery. Then did the nation’s slaves “defend their liberties against the invading

horde; and then—and not till then—those ‘horrors’ ensued, of which so much is

ignorantly and perversely said, and for the initiation of which the French soldiers were

responsible, themselves perpetrating all conceivable crimes and atrocities, and

compelling terrible retaliation on the part of those whom they sought to load with

chains.”4 In a popular pamphlet published in San Francisco, native New Yorker William

N. Slocum responded to the charge that the “horrors of St. Domingo” were the result of

emancipation. Citing the eyewitness accounts of the revolution by Colonel Malenfant and

Pamphile Lacroix, Slocum avowed that upon emancipation, ffeedmen were orderly,

3 “Horrors of St. Domingo,”Pine and Palm , 19 June 1862. 4 “Our National Visitation. An Oration, by William Lloyd Garrison, Delivered Before the Adelphic Union Society of Williams College, Monday Afternoon, August 4, 1862,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 13 September 1862.

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industrious, and peaceful. Only when Napoleon tried to restore slavery were the colony’s

whites “driven from the island with great bloodshed.”5 New York State Senator Henry

Low professed, “The bloody scenes of St. Domingo were not a result of giving freedom

to slaves; but first originated in the attempt to take from the free blacks the rights of

citizenship, and culminated in the bloody tragedies of Dessalines, when Napoleon again

attempted to re-enslave them, years after emancipation had set them free.”6 United States

Congressman Samuel Steel Blair of Pennsylvania asked, “What caused the “horrors of St.

Domingo?” It was not freedom. Only after Napoleon sent Leclerc did the terrible

violence ensue. Slaves then spilled their blood in a heroic struggle for freedom. The only

horrors worth remembering were those of “the attempt of fifty thousand white men to

enslave five hundred thousand blacks.” Blair urged, “Let rather the blood and the flame

of that horrid struggle impress the duty of peaceful emancipation.”7

If Napoleon, the Great Man of Europe, was responsible for the “horrors of St.

Domingo,” than Toussaint, the Great Man of America was its redeemer. Sanbom made

no distinction between the history of Haiti and the biography of Toussaint. Haiti’s history

intersected with the lives of a number of histories Great Men, like Colombus and

Napoleon, but it was Toussaint for whom Sanbom challenged “history to parallel the

military genius and the statesmanship of this negro.” Following the initial outbreak of

slave revolt and the subsequent emancipation of the slaves, the situation remained grim

until “an old plantation slave” rescued the colony and returned it to its former greatness.

5 William N. Slocum, The War, and How to End It (San Francisco, 1861), 43. 6 Henry R. Low,The Governor’s Message Reviewed. By Henry R. Low. In the Senate, Jan. 28, 1863 (Albany: Weed, Parson and Company, 1863), 22. 7 Samuel Steel Blair, Speech of Hon .S.S. Blair, of Pennsylvania, Deliveredin the House of Rep, Thursday, May 22, 1862, On House Bills nos. 471 and 472, for the Confiscation o f the Property and the Emancipation of the Slaves of Rebels (Washington, D.C.: Scammell & Co., 1862), 7.

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Under Toussaint, slaves worked, obeyed laws, and thrived under a written Constitution.

Had he lived, “St. Domingo would have continued to grow in wealth and power, and

would have become a century sooner what it must yet be—a great nation of civilized

o Africans.” The Commonwealth called Toussaint’s Code Rural the “most successful

solution of the difficulties in the way of emancipation, ever yet attempted anywhere.”

Toussaint bore no resentment towards the white planters. He brought them back to the

island and returned freed slaves to the plantation. “Prosperity returned to the decimated

Island. Her trade increased wonderfully; her people were strictly governed, but they were

happy, and they were rising in civilization. Property was safe; the justly odious whites

were respected and allowed to enrich themselves.”9 The front page of the National Anti-

Slavery Standard announced that when Toussaint joined the French army after the joint

invasion of the colony by the British and Spanish, “He brought with him an army of

blacks, and rising from one position to another by virtue of his successes, he became, in

1796, the actual governor of the island. His army was made up mainly of freed slaves,

well drilled; with these he expelled the English and the Spanish, and restored peace in

1798.” Next, he organized the ffeedmen in productive laborers. This was a difficult task,

“far worse than a similar work would be in our Southern States.” A decade of civil war

was poor training for freedom. Fortunately, “Toussaint, by a well-devised code of labor,

brought them back to the service of their old masters, and in a few years had well nigh

restored the former prosperity of the colony.”10

History was on trial, and the future of the United States, abolitionists insisted,

hung in the balance. Garrison called the proslavery narrative of the Haitian Revolution

8 “Emancipation. A Sermon Preached at Music Hall.” 9 “Emancipation. No. 1. Hayti,”Commonwealth, 25 October 1862. 10 “Emancipation and its Fruits in Hayti,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 7 December 1861.

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“historic falsification.”11 Charles Sumner, whose father raised him on tales of a visit to

the island at the close of the eighteenth century, referred to the abolitionist narrative as

“authentic history.”12 Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts insisted that the “real

truth” of the “horrors of St. Domingo” was that “they were commenced, prosecuted, and

carried to an unsurpassable height of fiendishness by the French invading mercenaries,

and only imitated, at last, to a limited degree, by the struggling blacks, in retaliation and

as a measure of self-defense.”13 Sanbom remarked, “Nothing can be more incorrect than

the common notion about the revolution in St. Domingo, which I take to be this: that the

slaves revolted, immediately possessed themselves of the island amid the murder and

pillage of their masters, and then set up their bloody government.” This idea was “totally

false.” The slave revolt of 1791 was only a local disturbance; the French decree of 1793

put an end to slave unrest; and consequently prosperity soon returned to the island.

Responding to the charge that the “horrors of St. Domingo” showed the inevitable results

of emancipation, New Yorker J. B. Lyon asserted, “Now, the fact is not so.” Haitian

slaves only responded to acts committed against them. “Such is the true history of the

‘Horrors of St. Domingo.’” 14

The New York Tribune challenged those who intentionally misused history by

using the “Historical Bugaboo” to silence abolitionists. In the case of St. Domingo, the

screams of “St. Domingo” demonstrated clearly how “History is abused.” The paper

acknowledged the racial bloodletting that took place. That Haitian slaves “took ample

revenge is not denied.” However, they acted within reason. “What caused them—who

11 “Our National Visitation.” 12 Charles Sumner, Emancipation! Its Policy and Necessity, 15; Edward Pierce, Memoir and Letter of Charles Sumner, vol. 4 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), 437. 13 “Repressing Slaves Insurrections,”Liberator, 24 May 1861. 14 “What Shall be Done with the Slaves?”New York Times, 6 September 1861.

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was in the right, and who was in fault—whether the Blacks did anything to be praised

instead of blamed—these are minor considerations, unworthy of the attention of men who

know absolutely nothing of that sad history, and who could not, for their lives, upon a

cross—examination, tell us whether Toussaint was a black man or a white one, what he

did while living, or where, or under what circumstances, he died.” The history of the

Haitian Revolution was at issue here. The French proclamation of emancipation did not

provoke the slaves to insurrection; it instead allowed their return to their plantations. It

was not until the French army attempted to re-enslave the population that the ffeedman

sought vengeance. “Such is the case of St. Domingo. Admitting all that the advocates of

Human Bondage say of it, it proves nothing against Emancipation.”15

At this crucial juncture in the life of the United States, history mattered more than

ever. That African American history meant so much was fitting. The nation was

confronting the racial paradox that defined its short history.16 The Christian Recorder

argued that the history of St. Domingo “is a leaf of our history not turned away.”17

Sanbom spoke of Haiti as a nation “whose history teaches wisdom by the most trenchant

example.” Providing a lengthy national history of the black republic, he paused, “Here it

is that the history of Hayti becomes of such importance to us; all that has gone before was

but the prologue to this.” Sanbom suggested that the history of the Haitian Revolution

always mattered to the United States, but now it was especially important, as “our own

slave states may act over the tragedy of St. Domingo,—now, of all times, we ought to

15 “Historical Scarecrows,”New York Daily Tribune, 13 January 1863. 16 Edmund Morgan writes in his classic account of the evolution of slavery in colonial America: “The rise of liberty and equality in America had been accompanied by the rise of slavery. That two such seemingly contradictory developments were taking place simultaneously over a long period of time, from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, is the central paradox of American history.”American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal o f Colonial Virginia (W.W. Norton & Co., New York: 1975), 4. 17 “The Views of Massachusetts,”Christian Recorder, 19 January 1861.

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study carefully these terrible chapters in that book of doom.” “Has the story any moral for

us?” The answer was yes. “The history of Hayti is set before us as a warning—as an

1 o example, too, could we have the wisdom and the courage to understand it.” Blair

implored, “If, when we shall have destroyed the rebellion and removed its cause by

emancipation, the effort should be made to re-enslave them, the instruction of the St.

Domingan experience will be of priceless value.”19 Garrison insisted that Americans

never forget the Haitian Revolution, as it taught a “solemn and impressive lesson .. . not

the danger of letting the oppressed go free, but the madness and folly of seeking to turn

freemen into slaves! It serves the position of the Abolitionists all the more tenable, and to

illustrate all the more striking ignorance and folly of their opponents.”20 The

Commonwealth put it succinctly, “Has the story no lesson for us?”21

Impressed with the pubic discourse on Haiti generated by the war, Harper’s

Weekly confessed the difficulty of interpreting history accurately. This was especially the

case when examining an event “that happened in another country many years ago, when

the object of the representation is the gratification of a malignant purpose, and when the

vehicle in which it is made is notoriously mercenary and untrustworthy, every reader

ought to remember that he is probably reading the grossest falsehoods.” Writers

ordinarily subjected the history of the Haitian Revolution to the “most stupendous and

malicious falsehoods”—“Here was the truth.” The French Revolution provoked the

Haitian Revolution and in the early years slaves acted properly. However, the atrocities

whites’ committed against blacks were incredible. Only after seeing “the whites and

18 “Emancipation. A Sermon Preached at Music Hall.” 19 Blair, Speech o f Hon. S. S. Blair, 7. 20 “Our National Visitation.” 21 “Emancipation. No. 1. Hayti,”Commonwealth, 25 October 1862.

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mulattoes ferociously fighting, the one party for equal rights, the other for exclusive

privilege,” did the slaves rise and revolt. It was terrible, for sure, “but it was not the result

of emancipation, for they were not freed; it was the consequence of slavery.” It was

during the ensuing period of anarchy that the French abolished slavery throughout the

colony. The immediate result was not chaos, but order. When Touissant emerged, he

recalled the fugitive planters and converted the former slaves into wage laborers. “The

island became once more peaceful, prosperous, and happy, as every state must be where

justice is the fundamental law.” The “horrors of St. Domingo” took place only when the

French army arrived in 1802 to re-enslave the ffeedmen. The paper implored, “Let it be

constantly remembered, then, that ‘the horrors of St. Domingo’ began three years before

the slaves were emancipated, and began because they were not liberated. They ceased

with freedom, and they revived with the attempt to restore slavery.” The truth was that

“The trouble of insurrection springs from slavery, and not from liberty.” The similarities

between the events on Haiti and in the United States were undeniable. “The point for us

all to remember, as men and citizens, is that it is always more dangerous to the public

peace to treat men as brutes than as human beings.” Harper's had become an abolitionist

paper. 22

Abolitionists targeted the men and women who attended public lectures and read

pamphlets and newspapers when they underscored the relevance of the Haitian

Revolution for the present war over slavery. Assuming that a groundswell of popular

support for abolition would force the president’s hand, they tried to win the hearts and

minds of the people. William Whiting and Moncure Daniel Conway took a more direct

approach. Shortly after the war began, both published books and held private

22 “A COMMON ERROR,”Harper’s Weekly, 19 April 1862.

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conversations with Abraham Lincoln to convince him of both the right of abolition and

the Constitutional powers of the President to exercise that right. Memory of the Haitian

Revolution was a key component of the arguments set forth by both men. Did the

historical memory of the Haitian Revolution influence Lincoln’s decision to issue the

Emancipation Proclamation? It is an important question, which demands our attention.

Few could have predicted the effect that William Whiting, the Harvard educated

schoolteacher and lawyer would have on the American Civil War. The first edition of

Whiting’s War Powers o f the President appeared in 1862. He wrote the volume to

determine, “What limit, if any, is prescribed to the war-making power of the President, as

Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy of the United States.” Whiting revealed his

abolitionist stripes at the outset, blaming the war on “A handful of slave-masters” who

broke up the Union, overthrew justice, and “destroyed domestic tranquility.” In a chapter

entitled, “War Powers of the President,” he cited both the American Revolution and the

War of 1812 as instances where Americans recognized the right of belligerents to

emancipate the slaves of groups of people in rebellion. It was the Haitian Revolution,

however, which he detailed at length. Whiting offered a narrative, focusing on France’s

legal justification for issuing a “proclamation” of abolition on August 29, 1793. He then

outlined the colony’s success under Toussaint’s guidance. Like an expert trial lawyer

delivering his closing argument, Whiting explained the reasoning behind his historical

recitation. “From this brief outline it is shown, that France recognizes the right, under

martial law, to emancipate the slaves of an enemy—having asserted and exercised that

right in the case of St. Domingo.” Because of French actions during Haitian Revolution,

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Whiting alerted the President that as the Commander in Chief he had the authority to free

Confederate’s slaves.23

If Whiting’s argument blindsided Lincoln with the force of a right hook, then the

writings of Moncure Daniel Conway were the left that followed. Conway’s story is

unique. The son of a Virginia slaveowner who moved to Boston and found employment

as a Unitarian preacher, Conway joined the Republican Party and became a leading

abolitionist writer and publisher. In the first two years of the war, he deployed the Haitian

Revolution in a widely-read book to convince Lincoln of both the benefits and legality of

emancipation. Conway took the title, The Rejected Stone; or, Insurrection vs.

Resurrection in America, from a verse in the Bible, which read, “The stone which the

builders rejected is become the head of the comer. And whosoever shall fall on this stone

shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall it will grind him to powder.” For

Conway, slavery was the stone that threatened to grind the white population of the South

into powder. In a chapter on emancipation written in the form of a letter addressed to the

President of the United States, Conway entreated Lincoln to abolish slavery so that the

nation would forever link “its destiny with that of Universal Freedom.” The world waited

to see inscribed on the national standard, “IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL

EMANCIPATION.” A policy of abolition was, Conway argued, legal, Constitutional,

and moral. Without it, white southerners faced a violent disaster. Conway maintained that

slave insurrections seldom accompanied emancipation. Anticipating the argument of his

detractors, he added, “But we hear much of the ‘fearful scenes of St. Domingo.’ I have

reserved mention of this island, because it contains for us a higher lesson.” Conway

23 William Whiting, The War Powers o f the President, and the Legislative Powers o f Congress in Relation to Rebellion, Treason and Slavery (Boston: John L. Shorey, 1862), 15, 72-73.

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affirmed the likelihood of a Second Haitian Revolution taking place in the South without

emancipation. Abolition, however, guaranteed peace. After all, “The motto of the

Negro,” Conway asserted, was always “Liberty, never Vengeance.”24

Northerners bought the arguments of Whiting and Conway, both figuratively and

literally. War Powers went through ten editions within a year of publication. Americans

purchased 30,000 copies of one edition alone. Within a decade more than forty editions

appeared. A contemporary of Whiting’s noted the book for the “profound impression it

has made and is still making on the public mind in all parts of the country.”25 The

Rejected Stone enjoyed similar success, going through three editions within a year of

publication. Conway distributed the book liberally to subscribers of Commonwealththe

and among the soldiers of the Union Army. Years later Conway remembered, “The

response to my book was astonishing.”26 Charles Sumner reportedly sent a copy of The

Rejected Stone to Lincoln, “who told him soon after that he was reading it with

interest.”27 During the war, both Whiting and Conway were close advisors to the

president. Lincoln appointed Whiting Solicitor of the War Department in 1862. At least

one scholar suggests that it was Whiting’s book, which convinced Lincoln of the

Constitutional authority of the president to free the slaves of the sections in rebellion.28

24 Moncure Daniel Conway, The Rejected Stone; or, Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America. By a Native o f Virginia, 3d ed. (Boston: Walker, Wise, and Company, 1861), 43, 94, 120-32 25 “The WashingtonRepublican,” Liberator, 24 April 1863. 26 Moncure Daniel Conway,Autobiography Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway, vol. 1 (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904), 341. 27 Conway also publishedThe Golden Hour in 1862, which was based on a series of lectures he gave in Washington, D.C., after which he had a private meeting with Lincoln regarding emancipation. Conway reported in his autobiography that Lincoln ended the conversation gravely with the following, “When the hour comes for dealing with slavery I trust I will be willing to do my duty though it cost my life. And, gentlemen, lives will be lost.” 346.Golden Hour was less successful commercially thanRejected Stone, though the two works bare obvious similarities. The Golden Hour (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862); Autobiography, 346, 366. 28 Mark Neely,The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 220.

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This is perhaps the clearest indication we have of the memory of the Haitian Revolution

directly affecting major public policy during the Civil War.

Toussaint figured prominently in the books of Whiting, Conway, and other

abolitionists who offered him as a synecdoche of the Haitian Revolution. Such use of

Toussaint was ordinary, in many respects. Since the eighteenth century, abolitionists

throughout the Atlantic world had made his story central to the memory of the Haitian

Revolution because he was a Great Man—a reassuring symbol of a nation bom in

revolution and blood. Still, this was different. In both volume and intensity, the explosion

of popular interest in Toussaint during the Civil War was unprecedented. In Northern

popular culture a veritable Toussaint cult emerged in the days, months, and years

surrounding the Emancipation Proclamation. Toussaint’s name was a part of the

American lexicon, and in some circles repeated as often as those of Washington and

Jefferson, and for that matter Lincoln, Lee, and Grant. His image appeared alongside

those of these men as well. The remembrance of this rebel black slave epitomizes the

transforming nature of the Civil War, for his importance flew in the face of the prevailing

racialist ideology of the mid-nineteenth century. The avalanche of speeches, texts, and

images of Toussaint that Americans both produced and consumed testifies to the

unlimited possibilities that opened to the United States, now that the young nation had

finally cleansed itself of its original sin.

In remembering Toussaint, northerners reaffirmed their faith in a new United

States, a free and racially egalitarian society in which the opportunities for its citizens

were, regardless of race, endless. We have already touched on the rise of oral and print

culture of Toussaint above. Still, the number of biographies given as lectures or printed in

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book form, in addition to those serialized in newspaper that were printed in the North

during the Civil War deserves an additional comment. It is impossible to browse a

leading abolitionist newspaper published during the Civil War that does not contain at

least one biographical narrative of Toussaint or at least a historical narrative of the

Haitian Revolution in which Toussaint’s name appears prominently. In addition to John

Beard’s biography, which was reprinted by Redpath in book form, and William Wells

Brown’s Black Man, abolitionists reprinted the historical narratives of British novelist

Harriet Martineau and the Haitian historian M. St. Amand during the Civil War as

newspaper serials.29 Advertisements for these were widespread in northern media. In

addition to these well-known accounts, some papers printed narratives by lesser-known

writers, such as Henry Melrose and Sara G. Stanley.30

Abolitionists demonstrated the viability of public memory of Toussaint in

redefining the United States when they detailed the similarities between the

circumstances surrounding the Haitian Revolution and those facing the United States

presently. The New York Independent put the similarities between Haitian and American

history into context, demonstrating the interconnectedness of the Civil War and the

eighteenth-century democratic revolutions in the United States, France, and Haiti. “The

American Revolution was the grandfather of the Haytien.” It “broke upon the earth like

that sun on the Arctic night. It flashed on France, an[sic.] was reflected from France upon

Hayti. The circle will be completed when Hayti, through her example and blood, shall

preserve and perfect us in the word and ideas of our fathers.” Toussaint rose from the

29 For examplesWeekly Anglo-African, 1861-62. 30 “A Few Facts About Hayti,”Weekly Anglo-African, 6 April 1861; “Toussaint L’Overture,”Weekly Anglo-African, 27 July 1861.

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ranks of a slave and became a leader. “Americans should study this life.”31 The Pine and

Palm asserted, readers “will be struck with the close parallel between the history of the

slaveholders of Hayti and of the same class of madmen in our Southern States. Step by

step, the Southerners are marching the same road, to the same destination—a welcome

with blood-red black hands to hospitable graves.”32 According to the editors of The

Commonwealth, “The interest of the subject is scarcely possible to exaggerate. For years

the abolitionists of Europe and America have seen that we were coming in this country,

to a repetition of some of the extraordinary incidents of Haytian history, and they have

dwelt with emphasis on the career of Toussaint, the greatest military genius ever

produced on this side of the ocean.” Yet neither of them fully demonstrated the greatness

of their subject. It was impossible to place too much emphasis on the significance of

Toussaint’s life, for no man in the modem era had such a prolific career. His

accomplishments dwarfed those of Washington and the other Founding Fathers, thus it

was imperative to remember him now.

Toussaint’s popularity extended to both visual and material culture, as public

demand for images and mementos of this Great Man erupted. James Redpath created The

Pine and Palm to promote African-American colonization of Haiti, yet the paper offered

much more, dedicating space on its pages to discussions of history, literature, humor, and

commercial advertisements. By the second year of the war, Redpath began modifying his

objective for publishing the paper, stating that he would use the columns of the paper

further to vindicate Haitian history.33 The Pine and Palm had illustrations, which was still

a rarity for an American newspaper in 1862. On the front page of the first issue,

31 “Toussaint L’Ouverture,”New York Independent, 4 February 1864. 32 “Horrors of St. Domingo,”Pine and Palm, 30 November 1861. 33 Pine and Palm, 19 May 1862.

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published just a month after the firing on Fort Sumter, Redpath included a large

illustration of Toussaint, a copy of an engraving with a caption that read, “TOUSSAINT

L’ OUVERTURE, TH E FIRST OF THE BLACKS.” It was a reproduction of one the

earliest images of Toussaint ever published, a portrait by Francois Bonneville that first

appeared on the frontispiece of Louis DuBroca’s biography of Toussaint, in 1802.

Redpath claimed it was “the only authentic likeness ever issued in the United States.” 34

He was incorrect in this assertion, as Dubroca’s biography appeared simultaneously in

Paris and the United States. It is, nonetheless, the first published in a newspaper.35 In the

portrait, Toussaint glances over his right shoulder and appears calm, confident, and

dignified, even demanding. Clothed in full military regalia, with large, plumed feathers

overflowing the ridges of his hat, he commands respect.36 The image provides a striking

contrast to the patronizing and racialized images of African Americans with which

Americans were familiar throughout the nineteenth century.

The image was a sign of things to come, as Toussaint became part of the

iconography of the Civil War. Illustrations of Toussaint were highly sought after

commodities during the war, and at least part of the demand lies in their novelty. Only in

the preceding decades had publishers and printers mastered the art of illustrations. During

the war, in fact, southern publishers continued to struggle to raise the capital necessary

34 Pine and Palm, 18 May 1861. 35 The first was Louis Dubroca’s biography, which was published in South Carolina, New York, and New Hampshire, in addition to Paris. The Life of Toussaint Louverture: Late General in Chief and Governor of the Island of Saint Domingo: with Many Particulars Never before Published: to Which is Subjoined, an Account of the First Operations of the French Army under General Leclerc (Charleston: T.B. Bowen, 1802). 36 Though The Liberator praised the book for its handsome appearance and interesting subject matter, Garrison commented on the inclusion of “What purports to be an ‘authentic portrait of Toussaint,’ but which looks like a caricature got up for some amusement by some waggish artist.” However, the jutting jaw of the subject fits the description of contemporaries who described Toussaint’s loss of the upper maxillary and teeth during the revolution. Daguillard,Enigmatic in His Glory, 26; “Redpath’sToussaint L ’Ouverture,” Liberator, 23 October 1863.

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for the technology and artists to print illustrations. 37 Technology alone, however, does not

explain the demand. Something about Toussaint resonated with the American people.

The first 6,000 copies of the issue of The Pine and Palm that included Toussaint’s image,

for example, image quickly sold out. Weeks later Redpath requested that readers return

extra copies to satisfy consumer demand.38 He then resurrected additional images of

Toussaint in Toussaint L ’Ouverture. The book contained multiple illustrations, including

another portrait of Toussaint on the frontispiece. This image was a reproduction of an

illustration of the French artist Nichola Eustache Maurin that first appeared in 1828 in a

collection of lithographs entitled, I’lconographie des Contemporains .39 Redpath’s

biography included not only images of Toussaint, but also a copy of Toussaint’s memoirs

and a reproduction of his autograph, something advertisements for the book stressed.

During the Civil War, Toussain’t signature was a collector’s item. One trade circular

described the auction of an autography of Toussaint by Edward M. Thomas, an African

American who had for years worked as a messenger to the House of Representatives.40

Visual representations of Toussaint resonated especially with African Americans.

Brooklyn educator and newspaper correspondent William J. Wilson, who taught in a

freedman’s school in Washington, D.C. during the war, made this clear in an article

published in the Weekly Anglo-African under the pseudonym, Ethiop. Wilson recorded

his encounter with a portrait of Toussaint, which hung in a New York City gallery

alongside other Great Men. Visual images were, Wilson wrote, more powerful

pneumonic devices than the printed or spoken word. Pictures called “up associations and

37 Fahs, Imagined Civil War, 35-36. 38 Pine and Palm, 3 November 1861. 39 Daguillard, Enigmatic in His Glory, 26. 40 “Miscellany,”The Historical Magazine, and Notes and Queries Concerning the Antiquities, April 1865.

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emotions,” and produced thoughts “that paint the memory afresh with hues the most

beautiful, touching, beneficial and lasting. A picture of a great man with whose acts we

are familiar, calls up the whole history of his times. Our minds thus become reimpressed

with the events and we arrive at the philosophy of them.” A picture of Washington

reminded Wilson of both the American Revolution and the birth of the Republic; that of

Jefferson invoked the memory of the Declaration of Independence. These men brought

before the mind great principles, yet the portrait of Toussaint seized Wilson’s attention

primarily. It was “a most beautiful portrait of one of the greatest men the world ever

saw—TOUISSANT L’Overture.” The painting hung prominently in the Southeast comer

of the gallery, “in good light as it ought.” Wilson confessed an inability to do justice to

the image with either pencil or pen. “Some future historian in other times, will yet write

the name of Touissant L’Overture higher and in purer light than that of any man that has

lived up to to-day.” For Wilson, the portrait reminded him of the accomplishments of this

Great Man, and the anonymous masses who followed him. “The whole history from the

first to last of this Island and this people is so vividly brought before the mind, by merely

this likeness of the inimitable Touissant L’Overture, that it is reimpressed with the

extraordinary, useful and touching lesson it teaches,”41

The Toussaint cult dominated African American wartime culture. Africans

Americans’ passion for Toussaint’s memory transcended age, class, and gender

boundaries. Elizabeth Holland of New York asked in the Pine and Palm, “shall we not

erect a monument of the memory of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the warrior and statesman of

Hayti, to whom Wendell Phillips has assigned a sculptured niche far up in the temple of

41 [William J. Wilson], “Afric-American Picture Gallery-Second P a p eAnglo-African r Magazine 1, vol. 3 (March 1859): 87; Wilson’s story is told Blackin Abolitionist Papers, vol. 4, 144.

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historic fame? Had I children, how gladly would I tell them of that immortal hero, who

rushed to arms in defence of that beautiful isle.”42 A female biographer wrote that for

such a man to rise from slavery, “leaving the brilliant characters upon the mountains and

sunny plains of his island home; there to glow and scintillate with an ever increasing

effulgence through the unfolding centuries.” His achievements were “something to elicit

the wonder, and admiration and reverence of the world.”43 African American

organizations and clubs that bore Toussaint’s name indicate the veneration of his name.

In May 1863, prominent black men and women of New York City and New Jersey

attended a banquet of the “Toussaint L’Ouverture Club.” In the Metropolitan Assembly

Room, a band, refreshments, and lectures by a number of “prominent gentlemen”

provided entertainment44 Another “L’Overture Club” comprised a group of young men,

most of whom had attended the Colored Grammar School, No. 1, in New York City. The

group sponsored and hosted a series of public lectures and debates. It was a literary

society, which the Weekly Anglo-African called, “much needed at the time.”45

In spite of the centrality of Toussaint in African American memory, articles

published in the Weekly Anglo-African illuminate how the appeal of Toussaint’s image

transcended racial boundaries. In 1864, black abolitionist Jacob Snider, Jr., of

Philadelphia, presented a portrait of Toussaint to a committee established to raise funds

for the family of a recently deceased abolitionist. The paper assured that the image did

justice to Toussaint’s blackness, writing that it was “unmistakably that of a pure

42 “Tribute to Our Race,”Pine and Palm, 19 October 1861. 43 “Toussaint L’Ouverture,”Weekly Anglo-African, 27 July 1861. 44 “The Toussaint L’Ouverture Club,”Weekly Anglo-African, 23 May 1863. 45 “City Items,”Weekly Anglo-African, 19 August 1865; A “Toussaint L’Ouverture” Club existed in Harrisburg PA, before the war. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 117.

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African.” The paper further testified to the portrait’s authenticity by detailing some of its

physical markings. “On the back of the frame there are wax impressions of three seals,

one bearing his [Toussaint’s] own effigy, while the second is the seal of the Republic,

and the third is evidently his own private seal... as a memento of the great African

leader is worth far more than its intrinsic value.” In order to obtain the portrait, Snider

traded a portrait of George Washington with John Bigelow, a prominent abolitionist and

intimate of Abraham Lincoln who during the war served as United States Consul in Paris.

He throughout his life displayed a marked affinity for Haitian history and culture, as we

will see below.46 The barter among friends reinforces the notion that during the Civil

War, some preferred even the image of Toussaint to Washington 47 Detroit newspaper

correspondent Toussaint L’Ouverture Lambert praised the “colored women of the city”

who had formed the Ladies Freemen’s Relief and Educational Society to aid the

freedmen and organized a fair to raise funds. As word spread of the event, white women

joined the group, which then decided to make the event a State Fair. Following the

suggestion of “one of the colored members of the Committee,” the group reinforced its

biracial character by promising to direct proceeds towards white refugees in the South, in

addition to the freedmen. The Society held the fair at Merrill Hall in the third week of

March. Among the exhibitors were Bamum’s Museum and the Post Office. Two large

paintings suspended from the ceiling greeted patrons in the main Hall. “One was a

46 Bigelow traveled to Haiti in December 1853, and left several accounts of his meeting with Emperor Soulouque. Jamacia in 1850. or, The Effects o f Sixteen Years o f Freedom on a Slave Colony (New York: George P. Putnam, 1851; reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Negro Universities Press, 1970), Appendix A; Retrospections o f an Active Life, vol. 1 (New York: Baker & Taylor Co., 1909), 146-52. An article published more than a decade after the war indicates his extraordinary respect for Haitian culture on its own terms. Bigelow’s analysis transcends the racialized discourse on Haiti in the nineteenth century. “The Wit and Wisdom of the Haytiens,”Harper's New Monthly Magazine 51 (June through November 1875): 130- 36, 281-91,438-41,583-87. 47 “An Authentic Portrait of Toussaint”Weekly Anglo-African, 29 October 1864.

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powerful portrait of Col. Shaw of the 54 tli Mass, who fell at Fort Wagner, painted and

donated to the fair by Mr. L. T. Iver, the other was a portrait of the celebrated ‘Toussaint

L’Ouverture,’ hero of St. Domingo, painted by Koal of Paris.” Lambert exhibited a

degree of satisfaction that the portrait of his namesake sold for $300. Shaw’s went for

$75.48

The proliferation of visual images of Toussaint sparked a spirited debate among

abolitionists as to Toussaint’s real appearance. A writer in the Commonwealth asked,

“Can any of your readers inform me where there is to be found a reliable portrait of the

famous Haytien Chief?” A writer from London responded, “there is in Paris a full-length

portrait of that extraordinary man, now in the possession of the Count de Fleury, and

presented to him by Madame l’Ouverture, the widow of Isaac l’Ouverture, second son

and heir of the general.” The paper offered, “We trust that an engraving will be taken of

this portrait and sent to the United States, where the number of persons interested in the

black hero is very great, partly in consequence of the masterly sketch of him given by

Wendell Phillips.” Redpath responded to this exchange, demonstrating his expertise of

the iconography of Toussaint. He knew of four portraits that existed, two of which he

dismissed as “fancy sketches.” The first was Rainsford’s; the second appeared in The

Pine and Palm. The latter Redpath obtained from a Haitian artist, “Mons. Madieu; but I

do not recollect that he gave any evidence whatever that it was a genuine likeness.”49

Though Redpath believed that the piece was “the work of a mulatto,” who likely

modified the “negro features,” he nonetheless considered it “valuable as a Haytian ideal

of the greatest of the negroes.” As to the location of the image presently, Redpath wrote,

48 “The Ladies Michigan State Fair,”Weekly Anglo-African, 8 April 1865. 49 It is possible that Redpath refers to Thomas Madiou, the renown Haitian historian and author of the multi-volumeHistoire d ’Haiti, 3 vols. (Port-au-Prince, J. Courtois, 1847-48).

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“Mr. Wendell Phillips has the best copy of it.” The two less authentic portraits were

“from the same original—a medallion said to have been made in Paris, as Toussaint was

on his way to the Chateau de Joux. It is to be found in two French lives of Toussaint, one

by St. Remy, a Haytian; and the other, Toussaint’s autobiography, or report of his public

conduct, addressed to Napoleon, when he was detained in his frozen cell in the Alps.”50

Two documents attached as an appendix to Redpath’s Toussaint L ’Ouverture

reveal the viselike grip that the memory of Toussaint had over abolitionists during the

Civil War. In the first text, Harriet Martineau recounts her journey through France when

she realized that she was close to the mountains “where Toussaint’s bones lay.” Gaining

access to Toussaint’s resting place was difficult; nonetheless, days later she and a number

of her party reached their destination. “We passed through the vault and passages I have

described, and thoroughly examined the cell. No words can convey a sense of its

dreariness.” The light was dim, the floor soaked with water, and objects had been

removed. A woman led Martineau to the grave. “The brickwork which surrounds the

coffin now forms part of new wall; but it was till lately within the church.” The

dreariness of the cell saddened Martineau long after departing, “and, glad as we were, on

rejoining our party at Lausanne, to report the complete success of our enterprise, we

cannot recur to it to this day, without painful feelings.” In “The Last Days of Toussaint

Louverture,” John Bigelow likewise described a visit to Toussaint’s tomb. “Returning to

Paris by way of Lausanne from a hurried trip to Geneva last winter, I took the somewhat

unusual route over the mountains to Pontarlier.” The “pilgrimage” brought Bigelow to

the French Alps and the room where Toussaint spent his last days. Bigelow took readers

50 “Portraits of Toussaint L’Ouverture,”Commonwealth, 26 May 1866; “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Commonwealth, 9 June 1866.

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to the cell vicariously: “The room which he occupied, and to which I was now

introduced, is some twenty five or thirty feet long, by, say, twelve broad.” What the

author saw in the center of the room startled him. “On the mantel of the fire-place was the

lower half of the skull, most of the brain-cover having been taken off.” The artifact was

Toussaint’s. Bigelow later traveled with a local librarian to see the top of the skull,

“which had probably been sawed off at the time of thepost mortem examination.”

Biglow then attached a transcript. According to the ghoulish text, when the doctors

examined Toussaint’s lifeless body there was “A little mucus mixed with blood in the

mouth and on the lips.” The report describes the condition of Toussaint’s lungs, stomach,

intestines, and bladder, and reveals the cause of death, “apoplexy pleuropneumonia.”51

Toussaint’s tomb had become an endowed space, a shrine to his memory. The macabre

fascination with Toussaint’s death requires some explanation. Douglas Egerton has

shown how throughout the antebellum period slaves’ bodies served as symbols of the

power of white men. Mutilation of the bodies of both living and dead slaves reinforced

the racialized hierarchy inherit in chattel slavery.52 Both Martineau’s and Bigelow’s

account, however, indicate something else. They highlight the intense public interest in

every aspect of the life (and death) of this Great Man, and underscore the concern with

authenticity that obsessed abolitionists. There was no greater evidence of the veracity of

the stories surrounding the greatness of Toussaint than the description of his remains. His

“bones” were relics of a Great Man who out of a colony of slaves built a nation of free

51 Redpath, Toussaint L ’Ouverture, 342-57. Bigelow’s account resonated especially in the North, appearing also in the Liberator and Weekly Anglo-African. Liberator, 7 September 1860;Weekly Anglo-African, 8 March 1862. 52 Douglas R. Egerton, “A Peculiar Mark of Infamy: Dismemberment, Burial, and Rebelliousness in Slave Societies,” in Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, eds.,Mortal Remains: Death in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003): 149-160.

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men. They proved the existence of a transatlantic revolution over slavery, its end now

finally in sight.

Memory of Toussaint aided and comforted northerners as they remade America.

However, the end of slavery did not mean that the national transformation was complete.

There was still the matter of the freedmen. While there was little abolitionists could do to

convert Confederates to the ideals of the new United States, there was an opportunity to

assist those who began the war in bondage. Throughout the war, abolitionists who

traveled south to aid the freedmen went armed with the memory of Toussaint. Hoping to

assist black southerners in the transition from slavery to freedom, and motivated in part

by their own fears of a repetition of the “horrors of St. Domingo,” they revived the

memory of Toussaint among the freedmen in an effort to make black men in his image.

Though Toussaint set a standard that few slaves could attain, abolitionists were confident

that the freedmen could mimic their counterparts on Haiti, who prospered because of his

leadership. A plantation mistress’s address to a crowd of freedmen described in a novel

published in 1865 indicates the conservative use to which northerners would put the

Haitian Revolution in the opening years of Reconstruction. “Be patient and strive in the

humble ways, for there are Toussaint L’Ouvertures innumerable, among your people,

who are worthy the martyr’s crown, or, better still, the laurel of liberty. The good God’s

day has not yet come for your perfect emancipation, but the blush of its dawn is upon

you. Be patient!”53

Public celebrations of emancipation presented an ideal occasion for abolitionists

to revive the public memory of Toussaint among the freedmen. In Washington, DC,

before a throng at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church celebrating the abolition of

53 Abby Buchanan Longstreet, Remy St. Remy, or The Boy in Blue (New York: J.O’Kane, 1865), 76-77.

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slavery, the young black orator William E. Matthews of Baltimore talked of the ancient

tradition of commemorating significant events. Intimating that the Fourth of July was not

yet a holiday for African Americans, he offered alternatives. “The colored people should

celebrate the birthdays of their great men.” In addition to the birthdays of the African

soldier Hannibal and the African American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, they

should observe the birth of Toussaint, “who worked successfully the greater than

mathematical problem that they who would be free must strike the first blow.” It was

essential that African Americans never forget the name of the man who “turned Hayti

from a hell of slavery to a paradise of freedom.”54 More than three thousand abolitionists,

soldiers, educators, dignitaries, and freedmen gathered in Charleston, South Carolina to

celebrate the first anniversary of emancipation. The event was resplendent with marches,

speeches, and ceremony. At Camp Shaw, a flag bearing the stars and stripes floated

above a series of large arches above the speaker’s stand, alongside the names of

America’s greatest men, “Washington, Lincoln, Toussaint L’Ouverture, John Brown,

Shaw and Adams.” On hand for the event were members of the Fifty-Fourth

Massachusetts, including Toussaint L’Ouverture Delany. “It was,” wrote one witness, “a

great day for the sable sons of Africa, who reigned supreme, demanding and receiving the

adoration of their white brethren.”55

Several reformers who relocated among the freedmen were especially qualified to

revive the memory of the Haitian Revolution among the freedmen. They had been to

Haiti and could speak of the legacy of freedom among Haitians. There was Hamilton

Wilcox Pierson, an agent for the American Tract Society, who before the war traveled to

54 “Grand Anniversary,”Weekly Anglo-African, 2 May 1863. 55 “The Holidays in Camp,”New York Herald, 19 January 1864; “An Event in the History Of South Carolina,” Weekly Anglo-African, 16 January 1854.

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Haiti to distribute French-language Bibles. When prospects for Bible distribution

diminished, Pierson returned to the United States and continued his proselytizing in

Kentucky. During the Civil War, Pierson returned East, landing first in Washington, DC

and then in northern Virginia, where he worked in the education of both contrabands and

black soldiers. It is estimated that by February 1862, Pierson oversaw the distribution of

100,000 pages of literature to contrabands at Fortress, Monroe, VA, and Port Royal,

SC.56 Francis Dana Gage also spent time in Haiti preaching the word of God and then

returned to the American South to aid the freedmen. Throughout the war, her articles

regarding life among the contrabands were widely circulated in the abolitionist press. 57 It

is likely that both Pierson and Gage shared their tales of the Haitian people and their

history with the freedmen. Charlotte Forten had never been to Haiti, but as an autodidact

of Haitian history, she documented her work among the freedmen in her journal. Forten

admired the work on the Haitian Revolution by Harriet Martineau and Whittier, and

opened correspondence with both. While living in Boston, she had attended Phillips’s

lecture on Toussaint, writing in her journal that her “enthusiastic enjoyment knew no

bounds.” Forten’s enlightenment came in handy while working as a teacher in South

Carolina, at one point marking in her journal, “talked to children a little while to-day

about the noble Toussaint.” The students showed great interest. “It is well that they sh’ld

know what one of their own color c’ld do for his race. I long to inspire them with courage

and ambition (of a noble sort,) and high purpose.”58

56 Samuel L. Horst, Education for Manhood: The Education o f Blacks in Virginia During the Civil War (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1987), 181. 57 “Market-Woman of San Domingo,”Weekly Anglo-African, 2 January 1864. 58 The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten, 97, 150.

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Schoolbooks distributed among the freedmen signal an important transition in

American abolitionists’ remembering of the Haitian Revolution. Lydia Maria Child’s

Freedmen’s Book and the American Tract Society’s Freedman's Third Reader came

among the boxes and crates of printed matter that northern abolitionists sent south in

order to educate the freedmen. Both offered short biographies of Toussaint and instructed

readers in how to become productive citizens of the new nation. As a Great Man,

Toussaint was the ideal model for the freedmen to emulate. Child explained her purpose

for writing Freedmen’s Book thusly. “I have made this book to encourage you to exertion

by examples of what colored people are capable of doing . . . Probably none of you will

be called to govern a state as Toussaint L’Ouverture did; for such a remarkable career as

his does not happen once in hundreds of years.” Though few African Americans could

equal the accomplishments of Toussaint, Child nevertheless insisted on the importance of

his memory at this critical time. “Well may the Freedmen of the United States take pride

in Toussaint l’Ouverture, as the man who made an opening of freedom for their

oppressed race, and by the greatness of his character and achievements proved the

capabilities of Black Men.” The Third Reader, the third installment of the American

Tracts Society’s educational primer, included a three-part biography of Toussaint. The

piece, which exceeded in length the biographies of other Great Men except that of

Abraham Lincoln, opened with a translation of the oft-repeated opening line from the

Biographie Universelle: Toussaint was “one of the most extraordinary men of an age

when extraordinary men were numerous.” To assist the freedmen in remembering this

name, the text included its phonetic spelling: “Toussaint L’Ouverture, pronounced Too-

sang Loo-ver-ture.”59

59 Lydia Maria Child,The Freedmen’s Book (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865; reprint, New York: Amo

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What separates these biographical sketches from the others published by

abolitionists during the Civil War is their construction of Toussaint in the fashion of the

British abolitionists of the mid-nineteenth century. Like the biographies by Henry

Gardiner Adams, Wilson Armistead, John Beard, and Harriet Martineau published before

the war and discussed above, these primers romanticized and sentimentalized Toussaint,

constructing him as a moderate, deferential, and accommodating former rebel slave

whose motto was “No Retaliation.” Child especially admired Toussaint’s refusal to aid in

the initial outbreak of violence in 1791. “Conscience forbade him to enlist on the side of

the slaveholders.” He eventually joined the uprising of slaves, “but, resolved not to take

part in their barbarities.” He became a leader not for any personal gain, but “that he might

protect the ignorant masses, and restrain those who were disposed to cruelty.”60 The

Third Reader described Toussaint as a slave who because of good conduct and superb

character earned the esteem of his master. During the revolution, Toussaint joined his

brethren in arms, but he had no feelings of revenge to gratify. He remained the “same

amiable and charitable person as ever.” His devotion to his master outlived the

insurrection, for he risked his life to aid his master’s family and send them to America.

Toussaint rose in rank, and “The first use which he made of his power was to establish

order and discipline among the blacks. To this they readily submitted; and peace and

prosperity in that beautiful island were the result of his incessant and most benevolent

labors.”61

Press and the New York Times, 1968), 83, 269; Robert Charles Morris, ed.,Freedman’s [ Reader ] Freedmen’s Schools and Textbooks, an AM Reprint Series (Boston: American Tract Society, 1865-66; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1980), 81, 83. Abolitionists distributed both liberally among the freedmen as part of their effort to increase literacy. TheLiberator wished that “those who can read will read it aloud to” those who were unable to. “The Freedmen’s Book,”Liberator, 8 December 1863. 60 Child, Freedmen’s Book, 46-48, 59-63. 61 Freedmen’s Third Reader, 80-84.

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Both books used Toussaint to inculcate in the freedmen the middle class values of

economy, industriousness, and familial devotion. Child noted that in spite of his fame,

Toussaint’s dressed simply and deferred to others. “His food consisted of vegetable

preparations, and he drank water only.” According to the Third Reader, Toussaint was

“simple in his dress, his food, and all his habits. Cakes and fruit, with a glass of water,

made him a good meal.” Because of his rule, the colony prospered. On the plantation, the

freedmen worked faithfully, and “upon receiving the wages of their labor, were

contented, obedient, and industrious. They submitted to wise regulations and necessary

authority; and, being free, were satisfied and happy.” According to both texts, Toussaint’s

manhood derived not from his military prowess, rather the love and respect for his wife

and family. Child noted, “No trait in the character of Toussaint Breda was stronger than

his domestic affections . . . he was always clean in his manners and language.” The Third

Reader noted that Toussaint’s domestic happiness was unparalleled. He married at an

early age and remained “faithful and affectionate” to his wife, once writing of his

domestic bliss on their plantation: “We labored in the fields, my wife and I, hand in hand,

and were scarcely conscious of fatigue. Heaven always blessed our toil, giving us not

only an abundance for our own wants, but the pleasure of bestowing food on our fellow-

blacks who needed it. This I greatly enjoyed.” The Sabbath and festival were special

occasions for Toussaint, as he always attended church with his family. His probity

extended beyond the home and throughout the colony. His example taught a nation of

slaves “that virtue, order, industry, and necessary self-restraint, were, under God, the only

and sufficient guaranty of civil and social liberty.”62

62 Child, Freedmen’s Book, 59-61;Freedmen’s Third Reader, 81-86.

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The discipline and order that Toussaint demanded of Haiti’s former slaves

provided American abolitionists with a defense for the army’s imposition of harsh

restrictions on the freedmen. Levi Judd Pardee contended that with assistance from the

North, freedmen would rise like Toussaint “from the glooms of social obscurity and the

house of bondage.” The question was labor. Fortunately, this was an issue addressed by

Nathaniel Banks, the former Governor of Massachusetts and recently appointed

Commander of the Department of the Gulf. Pardee wrote of Banks, “He is grappling with

the Labor Question, the pivot of this troublous affair, and the center of its statement.”

That some vilified Banks’ disciplinary measures among the freedmen troubled Pardee.

“Should the late Governor of this noble Commonwealth be blamed for that which the

inspiration and insight of Toussaint himself, once a slave, under almost similar

circumstances, though not so complicated, suggested and advised?” The solution was

simple, based on Haitian history. “Let the right arm of military power, wielded as a

parent and friend should wield it, be extended over the emancipated. As many of the

blacks as have gone beyond its adaptation will readily, peacefully glide from it.” Pardee

concluded, “For one, I am satisfied with the past, and rest secure in the assurance of the

future.” 63 Banks himself used Toussaint to justify his firm rule. Having spent time among

the freedmen, he felt secure explaining their needs. “What he asks and what he demands

is, that his children shall be educated, that his family shall be held sacred, and his wife

and children relieved from the hardship of field labor as soon as possible. That is what he

demands, and nothing more than that.” These were reasonable requests, and granting

them was not a new idea. “It has been tried for three-quarters of a century. Toussaint

L’Ouverture tried the experiment himself, for his own countrymen, in the West India

63 “The Coming Negro Nationality,”Liberator, 12 June 1863.

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Islands, and there is nothing different in his system from that which we have adopted,

except that his was infinitely more severe than ours.” Toussaint forced laborers to return

to the plantations of their masters, and required them to stay put. To leave required the

consent of either a magistrate or an employer. Toussaint placed men in command who

were both tyrannical and violent, and at his order, they hung any laborer found guilty of

the smallest crime, “as an example to the rest.” The actions of the United States Army

were tame m comparison. 64

Abolitionists put the memory of the Haitian Revolution to one final use.

Following the Emancipation Proclamation, they deployed the Apocalyptical Model of the

Haitian Revolution to argue for the urgency of emancipation. Now they used it to warn of

the inevitability of a Second Haitian Revolution should Confederates fail to acknowledge

the freedom of the slaves or consider their re-enslavement. A writer in the Weekly Anglo-

African hoped that such a thing would never materialize. Yet he maintained that

Confederates would make a mistake should they attempt to re-enslave the freedmen upon

the conclusion of the war, for they had “forgotten one characteristic of our race. Easily

led, held as slaves when their forefathers were docile, patient, faithful—when once

emancipated and armed—let whoever would re-enslave them remember the HORRORS

OF ST. DOMINGO!”65 In the United States House of Representatives William Kelley of

Pennsylvania warned of the dangers inherent in limiting the rights of the freedmen. “I

would not do with them,” he asserted, “what the French undertook to do in St. Domingo.

I would not, after having quickened their pulses by the word ‘freedom,’ and taught them

to gaze at hope’s star with tearless eye, madden them by saying, ‘You are slaves again,

64 “Address of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks,”Liberator, 11 November 1864. 65 “The New Year,”Weekly Anglo-African, 2 January 1864.

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and incapable of being free.’ I would not dare tell the freedmen, “You must win by

indiscriminate slaughter your freedom, or remain in slavery forever.’”66 The

Commonwealth wondered if American Toussaints might outlive the war. “The possibility

that a chief like Toussaint may rise among our own negroes, is to be taken into account in

all our reckoning about reconstruction and slavery.” The freedmen would continue to

fight for their rights. If Confederates attempted to re-enslave them, then the South would

“have her Toussaint as well as her St. Domingo.” fn

Two African Americans offered to lead the freedmen in resisting re-enslavement,

and used the Haitian Revolution as a touchstone. Frederick Douglass’ oldest son, Lewis,

upon retiring from the Fifty-Fourth Regiment reiterated the patriotism of African

Americans. “I have been in the army of the United States, I was not drafted or forced into

the service, but I volunteered on my own free will. I was influenced by an innate love of

country.” In light of the performance of black soldiers, it was unfathomable why the

government continued to deny African Americans equal rights and the new President

Andrew Johnson still urged their colonization. Fighting back tears, Douglass gave notice.

“I will, so help me God, be one who will help to raise an army of colored men to resist

this oppression and outrage; and if needs be, we will transfer the bloody work of St.

Domingo from Hayti to the United States, and teach this people that we yet have left

another Toussaint L’Ouverture.”68 William Wells Brown amplified Douglass’s patriotism

when addressing a large crowd at a public celebration of emancipation on the Fourth of

July. Brown argued that the government’s policies in the wake of the war favored the

66 William D. Kelley, et. al,The Conscription. Also Speeches of the Hon. W.D.Kelley, of Pennsylvania, in the House o f Representatives, on The Conscription; The Way to Attain and Secure Peace; and on Arming the Negroes. With a Letter from Secretary Chase. Phila. (Philadelphia: 1863.), 34 67 “Literary Review,”Commonwealth, 30 October 1863. 68 “From Baltimore,”Weekly Anglo-African, 27 May 1865.

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South by intending “to keep the black man down.” Brown avowed that he and “two

hundred thousand black men under guns” would never allow slavery to return. If such an

occurrence took place, “we shall have St. Domingo over again.” If the government failed

to protect black men, Brown promised to “go down South, and help accomplish the good

work.”69

To avoid a Second Haitian Revolution, abolitionists asserted that civil rights must

accompany the permanent abolition of slavery. Jonathan Gibbs avowed that the American

people would never forget the Haitian Revolution, and thus encouraged Confederates to

share the rights and privileges of citizenship with black men. The nation’s future

depended on it. “We are all marching on to the same goal. If you rise, we will rise in the

scale of being.” With a nod to the “horrors of St. Domingo,” Gibbs added, “If you fall,

we will fall; but you will have the worst of it.”70 African Americans in Worcester,

Massachusetts demanded both the political and social equality of the Freedmen. In a

public celebration, they adopted a resolution that expressed their concerns of the

unwillingness of the federal government to protect the freedmen. If the government

refused to alter this policy, then the end of the United States was near. It was easy to

imagine the scenario whereby, “Avenging Justice will call for a massacre of the whites

that will put into shade all the horrors of St. Domingo.” Such a thing was inevitable “if

these atrocities are allowed by the Government upon the innocent freedmen—nay, if they

are not instantly and most vigorously punished by the strong arm of the Federal

Executive.” The remaking of America required that the fundamental principle of

Reconstruction now be, “No difference between the nation’s white men and the nation’s

69 “Anti-Slavery Celebration at Framingham, July 4th, 1865,”Liberator, 14 July 1865. 70 Foner, Voice o f Black America, 265.

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black men, but all equal before the law.”71 Abolitionists distributed more than 10,000

copies of a speech in which William Kelley warned the United States Congress of the

consequences of failing to grant the suffrage. If “we ignore the rights of these four

million people and their posterity, the demon of agitation will haunt us in the future

fearfully as it has in the past. The appeals of these millions for justice will not go forth in

vain.” The author also lobbied for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the

Constitution, which would forever abolish slavery. He understood the difficulty of getting

Congressional approval. He avowed that if Congress denied the freedmen the right to

vote, than they could prevent neither their subjugation, “nor the bloody war that such an

attempt might provoke.” The southern states would witness a reenactment “of the terrible

tragedies that ensued upon the attempt to again reduce to bondage the freed slaves of St.

Domingo?”72 Abolitionist Gerritt Smith likewise warned of a horrible conflict if

freedmen were denied the ballot. Smith expressed his anger in an open letter published in

The Liberator, in which he offered two messages: first, “The nation is perishing, because

she persists in not letting the Negro into the human fa m i l yand second, “The horrors of

the worst o f wars—a war o f races—await the South, in return for the nation's crime o f

withholding the ballot from the black man.” Smith avowed that whites in the slave states

would invite a race war unless they granted the freedmen the right to vote. “But would

the blacks know how to carry on a war? They have been learning this very fast during the

last four years.” More than a-half century earlier, “it did not take the blacks of St.

71 “The Colored People of Worcester,”Weekly Anglo-African, 9 September 1865. 72 The Equality o f all Men Before the Law Claimed and Defended; in Speeches by Hon. William D. Kelley, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass, and Letters from Elizur Wright and Wm. Heighton (Boston: Geo. C. Rand & Avery, 1865), 19-20.

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Domingo a long time to learn how to exterminate their oppressors:—and how ignorant

those blacks compare with ours.”73

Leading abolitionists amplified this sentiment on the floor of the United States

Senate. Reverand George B. Cheever insisted upon the loyalty of African Americans and

demanded their recognition as citizens. Without civil rights, “Prejudice will be renewed

and strengthened; the envy, jealousy, and hatred of class and caste that have already filled

our cities with riot and bloodshed will grow. It will be a thousand fold more difficult to

eliminate colour from your legislation than it would be to keep it out.” The consequence

of failing to recognize African Americans as citizens was like “sowing the wind to reap

the whirlwind.” The outcome was predictable. “You are laying the foundation of a

second St. Domingo baptism in blood. You are providing the certainty of a future

independent empire and government of blacks in the south of your own country.” The

black population of the South would multiply, and not even the federal government could

restrain it. “They will become a military power; they will be smarting under their own

wrongs, will be consolidated by some Toussaint whom God will raise up, and you cannot

conquer them.” If the nation failed deliver justice to the freedman, his “blood be upon us

and upon our children.”74 Charles Sumner warned that the freedmen were already

discontent, restless, and anxious. They smarted “with a sense of wrong and a

consciousness of rights denied.” The freedman, Sumner insisted, “will not submit to

outrage always. He will resist.” The result would be the race war predicted by Jefferson,

only “The tragedy of St. Domingo will be renewed on a wider theater, with bloodier

73 “Letter of Gerdt Smith to Mr. Garrison and Mr. Phillips,”Liberator, 22 September 1865. 74 George Barrell Cheever,Rights of the Coloured Race to Citizenship and Representation; and the Guilt and Conseqeunces of Legislation Against Them: a Discourse Delivered in the Hall of Representatives of the United States, in Washington, D.C., May 29, 1864 (New York: Francis & Loutrel, 1864), 27-28.

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incidents.” Sumner reminded that on Haiti, it was the denial of rights to freedmen, which

caused the horrible insurrection. There was only one conclusion to be drawn. “Like

causes produce like effects; therefore, all this will be ours if we madly persist in the same

denial of justice.” The freedman in the South shared the same “organs, dimensions,

senses, affections, passions” of the freedman in Haiti. They shared the same capacity for

vengeance. To avoid a Second Haitian Revolution, Americans needed to “perform the

promises of the Republic, originally made by our fathers, and recently renewed by

ourselves.” When the time came, African Americans came to the defense of the United

States. Now it was time for the nation to repay its debt. “The freedman must be

protected.”75

75 The Equal Rights of All; the Great Guarantee and Present Necessity, for the Sake of Security, and to Maintain a Republican Government. Speech o f Hon. Charles Sumner, o f Massachusetts, in the United States Senate, February 6 and 7, 1866 (Washington: Printed at the Congressional Globe Office, 1866), 7.

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“A REPETITION OF SAN DOMINGO”: CONFEDERATES,

COPPERHEADS, AND THE HORROR OF EMANCIPATION

The abolition of slavery was the seminal event of the war and a milestone in the

history of the United States. For some it marked the culminating event of century-long

experiment to build a republic dedicated to the ideals of freedom and equality for all men.

For others it signaled a revolution in race relations that promised to turn the world upside

down. Following is an examination of the revival of the Apocalyptical Model of the

Haitian Revolution in northern and southern culture during the Civil War in order to

argue against emancipation. To sustain the Confederate war effort and buttress

Confederate Nationalism, spokesmen for the Confederacy used the Haitian Revolution to

warn of what they believed was the inevitable consequence of abolition, a climactic war

between races. The appropriation of the public memory of the Haitian Revolution in

response to the end of slavery highlights a widespread conviction in the minds of white

southerners that the Civil War had become a Second Haitian Revolution, an internecine

conflict in which a foreign army liberated and armed slaves in an all-out effort to destroy

the southern way of life. As Confederates would never submit to a repetition of the

“horrors of St. Domingo,” this fear had the effect of both reinforcing their commitment to

their imagined community and steeling their resolve to win the war.

207

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Northerners who were opposed to abolition but committed to the Union,

commonly referred to as Copperheads, showed their racial solidarity with Confederates

when they expressed similar racialist fears. They amplified the conviction of white

southerners that a war to end slavery not only threatened the lives of white southerners,

but every white man, woman, and child in the United States. That the revival of the

public memory of the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution transcended

sectional boundaries, indicates the survival of what Alice Fahs calls a “shared public

culture,” which the war failed to eliminate.1 This shared culture of newspapers, books,

pamphlets, images, and songs among various constituencies, illuminates both the

existence and resiliency of a white supremacist ideology that the war proved incapable of

eradicating. It furthermore anticipates the racialized response of whites in both sections to

the plight of the freedman upon the war’s conclusion. The cessation of the Civil War did

not mean the end of resistance to the social revolution that the conflict wrought.

For Confederates, the movement of the United States government to destroy the

South by abolishing slavery signaled the Civil War’s transformation into a Second

Haitian Revolution. Avoiding such a threat demanded a total commitment to the

Confederacy. On the same day of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, an Arkansas

Lieutenant invoked the Haitian Revolution to rally soldiers. Marrying the public memory

of the Haitian Revolution with support for the Confederate nation, he asked the members

of the Crittenden Rangers at a public flag presentation ceremony, “Shall our glorious

South be made a second St. Domingo? Forbid it, soldiers! Forbid it, heaven!” The

Lieutenant called on the troops to behold the “beautiful flag of the Southern Confederacy

. .. the most beautiful standard of the Southern Confederacy I have ever seen,” and

1 Fahs, Imagined War, 7.

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exhorted, “let us, conscious of the rectitude of our position, unfurl to the breeze our

glorious banner, and swear to defend it, come weal, come woe!”2 In the Georgia House of

Representatives, Reverend Henry Holcombe Tucker compared the plight of Confederates

to that of the Israelites. “In the midst of victory when the God of Israel had given success

to the arms of his people, their leader and king called upon them to forget their successes

and meditate on the desolations of war.” It was now time for the Confederate “to call

upon his countrymen in the midst of a series of victories such as perhaps were never won

in a war before, to forget their triumphs, and contemplate for a little the expense of life

and of sorrow which those triumphs have cost.” The war’s severity prompted both rage

and a yearning for retaliation against the North. Tucker boomed, “Let us kill! Let us

destroy! Let us exterminate the miscreants from the earth.” Northerners deserved no

quarter, for they designed “to enact over in all our land the horrid scenes of St.

Domingo.” 3

Minister Thomas Vemer Moore hoped to increase support for the Confederacy in

a sermon performed in front of the First and Second Presbyterian Churches of Richmond,

Virginia. Commenting on the abolitionist movement sweeping the North, Moore warned,

“Let this tremendous crusade become successful, either by mismanagement in the army,

or cowardice and greediness at home, and history furnishes no page so dark and bloody

as that which would record the result.” With the end of slavery, “Our best and bravest

men would be slaughtered like bullocks in the shambles; our wives and daughters

dishonored before our eyes; our cities sacked; our fields laid waste; our homes pillaged

2 “Crittenden Rangers,”Memphis Appeal, 17 April 1861. 3 Henry Holcombe Tucker, God in the War. A Sermon Delivered Before the Legislature of Georgia, in the Capitol at Milledgeville, on Friday, November 15, 1861, by His Excellency the President of the Confederate States (Milledgeville, Georgia: Boughton, Nisbet & Barnes, 1861), 6-7.

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and burned.” Moore offered proof that the Union army encouraged slaves to commit

horrid acts. “Have they not kidnapped hundreds of servants and then made them beasts of

burden; and is not their mighty armada now prowling along our coast, intending to arm

the rest for another St. Domingo massacre?” He demanded strength and resistance to

resist such a threat. “If God has willed with unrepining submission, rejoicing that though

he has perished, the cause has not, will not, and cannot perish, for God will maintain it to

the end.” For Moore, the switch to total war meant that there was “nothing now left us

but a death-grapple for very existence.” Confederates, he insisted, would not shrink from

such a challenge. Death was preferable. “If we must perish, is it not better to die the death

of a man on the field of honor, than to die the death of a dog on the gibbet? Is it not better

to meet this huge barbaric invasion with one flaming front of defiant resistance, than to

sit hugging our treasures until the grip of the invaders is at our throats, his manacles on

our wrists, and we bound helpless at his feet?” God was on the side of the Confederacy,

Moore asserted, and “If we are worthy to take our place among the nations of the earth,

no human power may hinder us; for eight millions of brave, united and determined

people can never be conquered.”4

As the war proceeded and the demands for a federal edict of emancipation gained

momentum in the North, Confederates charged northerners with waging an uncivilized

war against the white people of the South. In a popular manifesto of Confederate political

philosophy, T. W. MacMahon of Richmond, Virginia, denounced abolitionists who he

compared to the French Jacobins who lit the match that ignited the Haitian Revolution, “a

4 Thomas Vemer Moore, God Our Refuge and Strength in This War. A Discourse Before the Congregations o f the First and Second Presbyterian Churches, on the Day o f Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer, Appointed by President Davis, Friday, Nov. 15, 1861. Richmond: W. Hargrave White, 1861), 18- 24.

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monstrous tragedy of which the reader cannot be unacquainted.” Drawing comparisons

between the Haitian Revolution and the Civil War, he excoriated one Union General for

issuing an edict of slave emancipation in Missouri. John C. Fremont crossed the

“Rubicon of Barbarism.” He endeavored to reenact “in the South, that ineffably horrible

spectacle which desecrated the soil of Hayti.”5 Word of Lincoln’s preliminary

proclamation provoked indignation throughout the South. One Virginian responded, “The

extreme abolitionists—have succeeded in prevailing upon ‘Old Abe’ to issue a

proclamation of emancipation which will send a thrill of horror through all civilized

nations. He invites the servile population of the South to enact the bloody scene of St.

Domingo throughout the limits of the Southern Confederacy.”6

Leading luminaries of the Confederacy revealed their fears of an impending race

war when they affixed their names to a Joint Resolution of the Confederate Congress that

they addressed to their fellow citizens. The document, which printers immediately

reproduced and distributed in pamphlet form, is informing for several reasons: first, it

displays, in the words of Robert Durden, “the obsession with the past, with history, that

was already a hallmark of much southern thinking”;7 second, it highlights the

Confederate belief that both the abolition of slavery and the policy of arming black men

were two sides of the same coin—Confederates considered any alteration of the racial

status quo anathema; third, it exemplifies the viability of the Apocalyptical Model of the

Haitian Revolution to buttress Confederate nationalism. Containing the signatures of

more than one hundred of the Confederacy’s best and brightest spokesmen, the resolution

5 T. W. MacMahon, Cause and Contrast: A Essay on the American Crisis (Richmond, Virginia: West & Johnston, 1862), 89-90, 144. 6 “Lincoln’s Fiendish Proclamation,”Staunton Spectator, 7 October 1862. 7 Robert F. Durden, The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 25.

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began, “the present is deemed a fitting occasion to remind the people of the Confederate

States that they are engaged in a struggle for the preservation both of liberty and

civilization; and that no sacrifice of life or fortune can be too costly which may be

requisite to secure to themselves and their posterity the enjoyment of these inappreciable

blessings.” Northern “Fanaticism has summoned to its aid cupidity and vengeance; and

nothing short of your utter subjugation, the destruction of your State governments, the

overthrow of your social and political fabric, your personal and public degradation and

ruin, will satisfy the demands of the North.” The days of reconciliation were past. “At

one time, it was the wish and expectation of many at the South, to form a treaty of amity

and friendship with the northern States,” but instead “a cruel war of invasion was

commenced, which, in its progress, has been marked by a brutality and disregard of the

rules of civilized warfare that stand out in unexampled barbarity in the history of modem

wars.” The atrocities defied description. “Instead of a regular war, our resistance is

treated as a rebellion, and the settled international rules between belligerents are

ignored.” This was how northerners justified arming southern slaves, even though the use

of enemy’s slaves by belligerents was a gross violation of the wars of civilized nations.

Using history as a precedent, the resolution maintained that during the American

Revolution, Lord Dunmore refrained from employing Americans’ slaves as soldiers,

rather they were considered as nothing other “than as property and plunder.” The British

did not arm slaves because such a policy even in times of war were “severely condemned

and denounced by the most eminent publicists in Europe and the United States.” Now,

however, northerners ignored these rules. “Disregarding the teachings of the approved

writers on international law, and the practice and claims of his own Government in its

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purer days, President Lincoln has sought to convert the South into a St. Domingo, by

appealing to the cupidity, lusts, ambition, and ferocity of the slave.” While the situation

was grave, the document concludes with a rousing appeal to the citizens of the southern

nation: “be of good cheer and spare no labor nor sacrifices that my be necessary to enable

us to win the campaign which we have just entered. We have passed through great trials

of affliction, but suffering and humiliation are the school-masters that led nations to self-

reliance and independence.” The trials of war were but providential measures that

o “mature and develop and solidify our people.”

As increasing numbers of black soldiers came south, the conviction grew among

Confederates that they were witnessing a Second Haitian Revolution. White Southerners

experienced indescribable fear when witnessing the arrival of black soldiers. In the words

of one newspaper correspondent in Jacksonville, Florida, “They would not have cared if

white troops had surprised them, but to wake up in the morning and find Cuffee, Dick,

Bob, Sam, Hercules, Sancho—their old servants, their former riches, one million dollars

of fugacious property—up in arms, with knapsack, cartridge-box and musket, was galling

to human nature. The citizens, some of them talked profanely; the women went into

hysterics. They were, without doubt, terribly frightened.” Fear possessed them. “They

had a horrid nightmare; the thought of St. Domingo; they imagined blood, outrage and

death in most appalling shape!”9 The employment of black soldiers marked a radical

transformation in the North’s military objectives. A writer in Tennessee commented, “It

is announced in the Northern telegrams that one hundred thousand cavalry are soon to be

armed and equipped for our destruction. Simultaneously we hear from every quarter that

8 J. L. M. Curry,Address of Congress to the People of the Confederate States. Joint Resolution in Relation to the War: Conf. States of America, January 22, 1864, OR, ser. 4, vol. 3: 126, 132-33, 136. 9 “The First South Carolina Regiment,”Liberator, 10 April 1863

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regiments and brigades of negroes are also to be pressed into the ranks of our foes.” The

reason for these movements was clear. “Enemies, despairing of conquest by armies or

infantry, and unwilling to expose their own precious persons to the privation, suffering

and death result and from a fair and equal conflict, are resolved to bum up our bridges,

cities, depots and dwelling-houses, by raids in the interior, and to add the horrors of a St.

Domingo massacre to their own plundering and brutal warfare.” What did this mean for

the Confederacy? There was no turning back now. “Such elements of darkness do not

mean reunion; they do not even stop at the idea of conquest and subjugation; they can

only portend utter desolation and extermination.”10

An extraordinary account of a South Carolina planter published in the Charleston

Mercury demonstrates how the site of armed black men initiated Confederates’ memory

of the Haitian Revolution. The man was awoke at dawn one morning by a trusted slave,

“who rushed precipitately in my room, and informed me that two of the enemy steamers

were in full sight, and would soon be opposite my landing.” His house servants met him

at the portico of the house. They “all stood around me, professing the utmost attachment,

and their perfect willingness to obey my commands, but not exhibiting the slightest

degree of alarm or surprise. Finding that the negroes did not come to me from the

settlement, as I had ordered, I immediately went there, found them all about their

houses.” The master noticed the landing of about twenty black soldiers and a white

officer. He then ordered his bondspeople “to follow me and take to the woods, which

form a deep forest near my house. They all professed a willingness to do so, but not one

made a sign of moving. As I had not a single arm of defence about my person, I was

10 “The War of Cavalry and Negroes,”Chattanooga Rebel, 3 June 1863, printed inNational Anti-Slavery Standard, 4 July 1863.

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forced to fly to the woods for protection.” While escaping, the “enemy set house to

flames, smoke rising in distance, burning simultaneously were mills, overseer’s house,

and bams on his property and others.” Once loyal slaves “were rushing to the boat with

their children, now and then greeting some one whom they recognized among the

uniformed negroes, and who were probably former runaways from the various plantations

in the neighborhood. The negros seemed to be utterly transformed, drunk with

excitement, and capable of the wildest excesses.” This was the Apocalypse. “The roaring

of the flames, the barbarous howls of the negros, the blowing of homs, the harsh steam

whistle, and the towering columns of smoke from every quarter, made an impression on

my mind which can never be effaced. Here, I thought to myself, is a repetition of San

Domingo.”11

The specter of a Second Haitian Revolution colored the Confederate debate over

arming slaves, when battlefield failures led some to consider the once unconscionable

policy. Among the leading advocates of the radical measure was General Patrick

Cleburne of the Army of Tennessee, who insisted that the survival of the Confederacy

took precedence over the survival of the institution of slavery. “As between the loss of

independence and the loss of slavery,” Cleburne reasoned, “we assume that every patriot

will freely give up the latter—give up the Negro slave rather than be a slave himself.” In

a remarkable twist, he amplified the memories of radical abolitionists in the North who

insisted that the history of the Haitian Revolution proved that given the opportunity,

slaves would fight. In “Cleburne’s memorial,” the General and twelve signatories

invoked history to answer the pressing question, “Will the slaves fight?” Spartan slaves

“stood their masters good stead in battle. In the great sea fight of Lepanto where the

11 “The Raid on the Combahee,”Charleston Mercury, 19 June 1863.

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Christians checked forever the spread of Mohammedanism over Europe, the galley slaves

of portions of the fleet were promised freedom, and called on to fight at a critical moment

of the battle. They fought well, and civilization owes much to those brave galley slaves.

The negro slaves of Saint Domingo, fighting for freedom, defeated their white masters

and the French troops sent against them.” American slaves would also fight in return for

freedom.12 Cleburne’s reading of Haitian history violated some of the basic tenets of the

Confederate ideology. This has led Emory Thomas to conclude it contributed to the

disintegration of Confederate nationalism.13 More common was the response of North

Carolina state representative Lewis Hanes, who warned the General Assembly of the

likely results of the presence of “200,000 negroes well-armed, with all their passions

aroused.” They would assuredly reenact “among us all the inexpressible horrors of the

massacre of Saint Domingo.”14 Another North Carolinian echoed Hanes’s belief: “The

negroes are to be armed, and society is to be not merely upset, but destroyed.” The events

that the French Revolution caused on Haiti “will afflict us here, if this policy be adopted.

We call upon the Legislature of this State, now in session, to rise to the magnitude of the

occasion, and not only to stamp this infamous proposition with the seal of its reprobation,

but to adopt promptly the most vigorous measures to enact an honorable PEACE, which

can alone close this Pandora’s box of ills untold.”15

Probably no other speech delivered on black soldiery in the South reached as

many readers than that of Mississippi State Congressman Henry Cousins Chambers, who

12 OR, ser. l,vol. 52:589-91. 13 Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation 1861-1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). 261-64. 14 Mark L. Bradley, “The Monstrous Proposition: North Carolina and the Confederate Debate on Arming the Slaves,”North Carolina Historical Review 80, no. 2 (April 2003): 171. 15 Durden, The Gray and the Black, 141.

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responded to Jefferson’s Davis’s proposal to emancipate and arm slaves in November

1864.16 Chambers acknowledged the use of slaves in supplying Confederate forces on the

front lines, but insisted of the southern slave, “He cannot be made a minute man.”

Cousins expressed relief that the Confederacy was “not yet reduced to extremity,” and

begged God that the Confederate Army “may never have to drink this cup.” Chambers

invoked the Haitian Revolution to suggest the futility of a Confederate policy of black

soldiers. “In St. Domingo, the English, in 1792, with less than 1,000 men, captured

several fortified places from the French authorities, who had over 20,000 troops, chiefly

negroes and mulattoes; and finally, with less than 2,000 men, captured Port au Prince, the

capital of the island. The French, in extremity, offered freedom to the slaves, more than

400,000 in number, on condition of military service; but only 6,000 accepted the boon.”

These were slaves “whose hands were still bloody with the massacres perpetrated in the

memorable insurrection of 1790.” The suggestion of arming slaves was ludicrous. Even

so, Chambers asked, what would happen to the Slave Soldier upon completion of the

war? “Will you offer him his freedom?” The North will offer him freedom. “Will you

offer him the privilege of returning home to his family, a freeman, after the war? That

you dare not do, remembering it was the free negroes of Saint Domingo, who had been

trained to arms, that excited the insurrection of the slaves.” The solution was simple.

“Better far to employ mercenaries from abroad, and preserve that institution which is not

only the foundation of our wealth but the palladium of our liberties.” To experiment with

black troops in an effort to win the war was to admit defeat. “When we shall be reduced

16 The speech was widely reprinted in northern and southern newspapers as well as in pamphlet form.

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to the extremity of exclaiming to the slaves, ‘Help us, or we sink,’ it will already have

been quite immaterial what course we pursue!” 17

The Confederate fear of a Second Haitian Revolution stemmed largely from the

anxiety of white men losing their lives to black slaves. It also derived from white men’s

fears of losing their patriarchal authority over white women. This is something that

Confederate speakers and writers made clear. Henry Holcombe Tucker asserted that by

initiating a Second Haitian Revolution, northerners by “the popular voice” doomed

Confederates “to death and our wives and daughters to worse than death; and when after

these outrages, we sought no retaliation but besought them to let us go in peace, they still

clutched us with frantic grasp, in order to filch away our substance, and reduce us to a

1 o > # bondage more degrading than that which they affect to pity in the negro.” A wnter m

the Charleston Mercury predicted the outcome of both emancipation and the enlistment

of black soldiers in the Confederate army. “The best portions of our whole magnificent

country goes to waste . . . Instead of being the great producers of the world, the Cotton

states become its worst.” The social result was incomprehensible. In an instant, “the

intelligence, the refinement of the country is reduced to want, and is merged in the

general ruin.” The poor man was in the most jeopardy. “He is reduced to the level of a

nigger, and a nigger is raised to his level. Cheek by jowl they must labor together as

equals.” His wives and daughters were “to be hustled on the street by black wenches,

their equals. Swaggering buck niggers are to ogle them, and to elbow them. Gracious

God!” Was this why Confederates fought, “to reduce themselves to the level and

companionship of niggers? No-no-never-not in South Carolina.” The writer railed, “Let

17 “The Question of Arming Negroes, Speech by Hon. H. C. Chambers, of Mississippi,”Richmond Whig, printed in New York Times, 19 November 1864. 18 Tucker, God in the War, 6-7.

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the man who is afraid to fight himself, and wants to send a nigger to fight in his place—

heedless of all else, so long as he is out of it—talk of emancipation, and niggers in the

ranks. But the brave soldier who is fighting for the supremacy of his race will have none

of it—no, none of it. He wants no Hayti here—no St. Domingo—no mongrels in his

family—no miscegenation with his blood.” This was unquestionably the result. The

whole project was “insane, demoralizing, destructive, hopeless.”19

The popular revival of some of the literary and visual tropes of the “horrors of St.

Domingo,” which reinforced Confederates’ construction of the Civil War as a Second

Haitian Revolution, depended largely on the imagined threat that black slaves posed to

white women and children. No image associated with the Haitian Revolution illuminates

the viability of this fear among Confederates than that of rebellious slaves impaling white

infants on swords and pikes. The image reverberated throughout southern wartime print

and visual culture. A writer in the Richmond Examiner responded with outrage to the

provision in the Emancipation Proclamation that legalized the arming of black soldiers.

‘Arming Negroes!’ Why it sends a thrill of horror to every true woman’s heart, that chills

and freezes the soul. ‘Arming Negroes!’ Why, it is but another name for lust and rapine,

and indiscriminate carnage. ‘Arming Negroes! ’ Why, it means the heart of the man on a

dagger, the body of the infant on a pike, and the mother strangled and dying, the victim of

hellish passion.”20 T. W. MacMahon sold more than 10,000 copies of his Confederate

primer, a book in which he deployed Bryan Edwards’ words when he announced that as a

result of emancipation on Haiti, slaves “marched with spiked infants on their spears

instead of colors; they sawed asunder the male prisoners, and violated the females on the

19 “Men Run Mad, ” Charleston Mercury, 26 January 1865. 20 “General Butler’s Address to the People of New Orleans,”Richmond Examiner, 19 January 1863.

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dead bodies of their husbands.”21 A writer from Baltimore calling himself “Harper,”

wanted Northerners to explain how they would end slavery and avert race war. “ ‘Slavery

is the cause of the war,’ say you; ‘let us while we are about it destroy the root of the evil.’

Well, the case is ready for your surgery, how will you apply the knife? There is one way-

simple, sure and deadly—the John Brown method.” According to Harper, northerners

would either “Establish a footing anywhere in the heart of the cotton region, or begin

upon Virginia and the rebellious counties of Maryland; collect a sufficient number of

blacks, free or slave; arm them with pikes, scythes, knives, pitchforks and lucifer

matches. Firearms would be rather an embarrassment.” Only “a few barrels of common

com whiskey, magazines of which might be provided at different practicable points”

were necessary ammunition. Starting the slaves inland, they would kill and bum. “The

aged and feeble will perish in the flames of their homesteads, women will meet a worse

fate, and infants will be carried to the next plantation impaled on pikes and pitch forks.

The tossing of infants in the air to catch them on the points of bayonets was a pastime

much in vogue with the liberators of St. Domingo.”22

Probably no depiction of this visual trope evoked greater emotion than the

illustration by Baltimore artist Adalbert Volck (Figure 7.1). In a lithograph entitled,

Writing the Emancipation Proclamation, Volck portrays a brooding Abraham Lincoln

seated at a small desk drafting the proclamation, with his left foot resting on a copy of the

Constitution. A devilish figurine at the center of the desk holds an inkwell securely in

place. The desk’s spectral eye and cloven hooves amplify the satanic imagery. In the

21 T. W. MacMahon, Cause and Contrast, 90; “The Great Essay, Cause and Contrast,”Richmond Examiner, 26 January 1863. 22 “The Rebellion: How Can Slavery be Turned Against the Rebellion,”New York Times, 5 December 1861.

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background, two paintings hang on the wall. Above Lincoln is a portrait of John Brown,

holding a pike in his left hand. A halo floats above his head. To Lincoln’s right is a

portrait entitled, “St. Domingo.” In the image, half-naked African slaves dance and gyrate

in a wild orgy of blood and bedlam. A slave dressed in a loincloth prepares to stab a

white infant he holds upside down. Other slaves impale young victims on spears and

pikes in the background, while one carries a woman into the woods where he will ravish

his pure and innocent young captive. With the writing of the Emancipation Proclamation,

the Civil War had become a Second Haitian Revolution.

Figure 7.1: Adalbert Volck, Writing the Emancipation Proclamation, 1864

More than a century-and-a-half removed from the Civil War and slavery it is easy

to dismiss Confederates’ fears of a Second Haitian Revolution taking place in the

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southern United States as either hyperbole or propaganda. Surely white southerners did

not believe that white northerners genuinely wished a race war upon the South. This line

of thinking is due at least in part to the resiliency of the romantic notion that the Civil

War, in spite of its brutality and unprecedented violence was a kindler, gentler war. That

this was a war among brothers. However, there are a number of reasons why we cannot

dismiss Confederates’ fears as rhetoric. First, throughout the Civil War, slaves’ actions

reinforced the belief that they held the same potential for insurrection as Haitian• • slaves. 23

Confederates interpreted any form of slave resistance as an indication of a Second

Haitian Revolution. A Mississippian revealed to a correspondent of the New York Times

his belief in such an occurrence, when describing an incident in Vicksburg. “A planter,

owning several hundred negroes, ordered three of them to do some trivial work; they

grumbled, and finally said, they would do it, but they needn’t without they wanted to, as

they could befree whenever they liked.” Unwilling to accept such a transgression, “In an

instant the master drew his revolver, and shot one of them dead on the spot. The next day

the master met the other two negroes just as he was coming out of his house. One of them

deliberately aimed an old shot-gun at him, and in an instant he was a dead man.” Both

slaves eventually escaped and eluded their pursuers. “All the ‘peculiar institution’ seems

to want is a leader, when a second St. Domingo massacre will be the inevitable

consequence.”24 Sometimes even the absence of slave resistance signaled a Second

Haitian Revolution. One writer commented on the similarities existing between events in

the South and those that precipitated the Haitian Revolution. “The great increase of

23 For a detailed account of a widespread slave conspiracy and the subsequent cover up in Civil War Mississippi, see Winthrop Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993). 24 “Sable Clouds,”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 29 June 1861.

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wealth introduced by the cultivation of cotton is gradually bringing about a state of things

not unlike that which existed in Hayti before the rebellion of her slaves. Planters, weary

of the monotony of a life in the country, where they have nothing to do but to receive the

proceeds of the cotton fields, are every year removing their residences to the villages and

larger cities, leaving the country inhabited only by slaves and their overseers.” Should the

war reach the interior, “a slave insurrection is inevitable.” j 25

Abolitionists in the Union army reinforced the notion among Confederates that

the men and women they held in bondage could reenact the Haitian Revolution. General

Benjamin Butler addressed several men in New Orleans who he intended “to further

some certain purpose of his.” When the men expressed disapproval of the plan, he

responded with a threat. Butler warned “that by a wave of his hand from the top of the St.

Charles Hotel he could make New Orleans a second St. Domingo, & if it suited his

purpose he would yet make the Streets of the City run with blood.”26 In Kansas,

Lieutenant Colonel George Hoyt revealed an abhorrence of the Confederacy that matched

his hatred of slavery. Of the Confederacy Hoyt declared, “I hate her history, and I hate

her traditions, for upon all I behold the unwashed stains of that unavenged blood extorted

by the lash of the slave-whip.” Hoyt wished the worst for the states that still allowed

slavery, “that the sun of another Saint Domingo may rise upon her, and a million

Toussaint Louvertures, clad in the habiliments of war, and with vengeance written on

their faces, with one desperate and triumphant stroke, dash in pieces the accursed

South.”27

25 “Will the Negroes Rise?”National Anti-Slavery Standard, 8 June 1861. 26 Isachar Zacharie to Abraham Lincoln, 14 January 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers. 27 Miscegenation Indorsed by the Republican Party (New York: 1864), 7.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The second reason why we must acknowledge white southerners’ fears of a

Second Haitian Revolution is that many of them carried the mental baggage of the

memories of the first one with them throughout the war. Like their recollections of

childhoods spent beneath sunny skies amidst bucolic landscapes, these private memories

informed their thoughts and actions. Remarkable is the extent to which Confederate

soldiers, officers, and politicians recorded their fears of a Second Haitian Revolution.

There was Edmund Ruffin, who fired one of the first salvos at Union forces at Fort

Sumter. Before the war, he demonstrated a near obsession with Haitian history on the

pages of the South’s leading literary journal, DeBow’s Review. There was also Alabama

Secession Commissioner Stephen Fowler Hale, who served as Lieutenant Colonel in the

Eleventh Alabama and lost his life at the Battle of Seven Pines. It was Hale who insisted

that Lincoln’s election meant a new brand of government that “destroys the property of

the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile

insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to

pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.” Henry Louis

Benning, who served as a colonel in the Seventeenth Georgia Infantry, described the

“nightmarish scenario” following emancipation. “We will be overpowered and our men

will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth; and as for our women, the

horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination.” This was the “fate which

Abolition will bring upon the white race. But that is not all of the Abolition war. We will

be completely exterminated, and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and

28 S. F. Hale letter to B. Magoffin, December 27, 1860,OR, 4, vol. 1, 8.

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then it will go back to a wilderness and become another Africa or St. Domingo.”? 29

Confederate Assistant Secretary of War Colonel Albert Taylor Bledsoe denounced

abolitionists and maintained that it was impossible for them to achieve ultimate success:

“even if every individual in our country, out of the limits of the slaveholding States, were

united in their purposes. They can not have even the miserable triumph of St. Domingo—

of advancing through scenes of atrocity, blood and massacre, to the restoration of

barbarism.”30 Confederate Senator William Yancey shared his memories of the “horrors

of St. Domingo” in the United States Congress. Forewarning of the dangers of

abolitionism in the United States, he offered Haiti as a stark reminder of a place “where

wives were violated upon the bodies of their slaughtered husbands, and the banner of the

inhuman fiends was the dead body of an infant, impaled upon a spear, its golden lock

dabbled in gore, and its little limbs stiffened by the last agony of suffering nature! Such

things will never be on these shores.”31 Confederate States of America Postmaster

General and co-author of the Confederate Constitution, John H. Reagan was well aware

of the mode of emancipation on Haiti. “The white race was exterminated by all the

implements and modes of cruelty and torture that ingenuity and barbarism could invent.

Yes, sir, exterminated. The fields then glowing under the hand of industry soon went

back into jungle, inhabited by the wild beasts of the forest; grass grew in the streets of

their cities, and ships departed from their ports to return no more.” Racial equality was

the next step. Abolition, Reagan exhorted, “would make us re-enact the scenes of

29 George H. Reese, Proceedings VA State Convention of 1861, vols. 4 (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1965): 1:66. 30 Bledsoe, Cotton is King, 622. 31 “Speech of Mr. Yancey, of Alabama,”Appendix to the Cong. Globe, 28th Cong. 2d Sess. (1845), 90.

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revolution and anarchy we have so long witnessed and deplored in the American

Government to the south of us.” 32

Confederates’ fears of a Second Haitian Revolution reveal the extent to which

white southerners’ oral traditions matched those of black southerners’. Gilbert Moxley

Sorrel, Brigadier-General in the Army of Northern Virginia, gained fame fighting at

Manassas, Petersburg, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness. He never forgot the Haitian

Revolution as the result of a family oral tradition that survives today. In his memoirs

published late in life, Sorrel wrote of his Grandfather, Antoine Sorrel des Rivieres, a

Saint Domingue planter who “had the tragic horror of witnessing the massacre of many

relatives and friends. His property was destroyed, and his life barely saved by

concealment.” Sorrel recalled that his father, Francis, also survived the Haitian

Revolution. “He was saved from the rage of bloodthirsty blacks by the faithful devotion

of the household slaves, and some years later succeeded in reaching Maryland, where he

was educated.” The father rarely discussed with this children the memories of “the awful

tragedies of those days.” Though decades removed from the horror, their recollection

caused him to shudder to such a degree that the conversation always came to an

immediate stop. “It is for this reason that so little of his early life has been gathered and

preserved.”33 Ironically, Sorrel failed to mention what at least one historian and relative

suggests; that is, that his grandfather remained in Saint Domingue for nearly a decade

after the outbreak of the initial rebellion and likely served in the French colonial army

under Toussaint as Chief Engineer of the Department of the West. The oversight was

32 John H. Reagan, “State of the Union. Speech . . . Delivered in the House of Representatives, Jan. 15, 1861,” in Wakelyn,Southern Pamphlets on Secession, 148-51. 33 Gilbert Moxley Sorrel, Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer, ed. Bell Irvin Wiley (New York and Washington: Neale Publishing Company, 1905; reprint, Jackson, Tennessee: McCowat-Mercer Press, 1958), 13.

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intentional. Employment in Toussaint’s black army was an experience best omitted from

the oral tradition of a family in a slave society built on the memories of the “horrors of St.

Domingo.”34

The Confederacy’s Secretary of War likewise carried into the war private

memories of the Haitian Revolution. Bom in the British West Indies and raised in South

Carolina, Judah P. Benjamin married a French woman whose father was a refugee of the

Haitian Revolution. According to one of Benjamin’s biographer, Auguste St. Martin was

a “delightful old gentleman who entertained the young people with tales of the bloody

slave insurrection in Santo Domingo.” The effect of these stories on Benjamin is

evident in public addresses he delivered on the eve of and then during the war. Upon

switching political party affiliation in 1856, Benjamin in the United States House of

Representatives commented on his reason for refusing to remain in a party that included

abolitionists: “because the history of Hayti is written in character so black, so dark, so

prominent, that we cannot be ignorant of the fate that awaits us if measures similar to

those which have produced that result there are also to be inaugurated in our Southern

states.”36 In a speech one biographer calls “one of the most dramatic moments in the

history of the United States Senate,” Benjamin deployed the imagery of the

Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution to advocate Secession in the December

34 John Gordon Freymann, The Sorrel Family in Saint-Domingue (Haiti): 1763-1813 (Avon, Connecticut: J.G. Freymann, 2000), 21-24. 35 Pierce Butler, Judah P. Benjamin (Philadelphia: G. W. Jacobs, 1907; reprint, New York: Chelsea House, 1980), 11-12, 14, 76; Robert Douthat Meade,Judah P. Benjamin: Confederate Statesman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), 157. 36 Butler, Judah P. Benjamin, 157; Butler listed among his favorite books, John Campbell’sNegro-Mania. The book includes a proslavery narrative of the Haitian Revolution that includes the recognized tropes of the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution. It is unclear whether Benjamin’s familiarity with the revolution further fed his interest in this book, or if the opposite is the case.Negro-Mania: Being an Examination of the Falsely Assumed Equality of the Various Races of Men (Philadelphia: Campbell & Power, 1851), 495-501.

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1860. Responding to the prospect of abolition in the South, Benjamin avowed, “you may

carry desolation into our peaceful land, and with torch and fire you may set our cities in

flames . . . add all the horrors of a servile insurrection to the calamities of civil war; you

may do all this . . . but you can never subjugate us.”37 During the war, Benjamin uttered

his dismay at the inability of European nations to recognize Confederate independence,

justifying their decision thusly, “The example of St. Domingo does not seem in the least

to disturb the faith of these philanthropists in the entire justice and policy of a war waged

for this end, and our resistance to the fate proposed for us is treated as a crime against

liberty and civilization.”38

United States Senator Garrett Davis disclosed his personal reminiscences of the

horrors of the Haitian Revolution to the members of the United States Senate during the

Civil War, as they pondered both the emancipation of slaves and their admission into the

Union Army. Davis remarked that by putting weapons into the hands of slaves, “all hope

of the reconstruction of this Union is gone—gone forever. Oh! You don’t know what

horrors such a measure might produce.” Davis implored the men in the chamber to

review their history books. “Recur to your early reading; examine again in the Library the

history of the insurrection in San Domingo, with all its blood and atrocities, the reading

of which makes human nature shudder. I have seen men refugees from the servile

insurrection of San Domingo, and the living, glowing, horrid colors in which they painted

those scenes to me, haunt my memory to this day.”39 The public admission is informing.

37 Robert N. Rosen, The Jewish Confederates (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), 11; Cong. Globe, 36th Congress, 2d Sess. 31 (1860), 217. 38 Durden, The Gray and the Black, 19. 39 Andrew J. Graham and Charles B. Collar, eds.,Pulpit and Rostrums, Orations, Popular Lectures, & c. Three Unlike Speeches, by William Lloyds Garrison, o f Massachusetts, Garrett Davis o f Kentucky, Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia. The Abolitionists, and their Relations to the War. The War Not for

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A slaveowner who supported the Union, Davis shared much of the fear and anxiety felt

by Confederates. Still, he did not join the Confederacy. He never rejected his

Americanness. In order to understand fully the impact that the memories of the

Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution had on the Civil War, we must consider

its revival in northern culture. In the North, Copperheads, like Davis, remembered the

“horrors of St. Domingo,” and used these memories to resist the social revolution that

was taking place around them. Insisting that abolition meant the arrival of numerous

horrors, chief among them race war and miscegenation, they entered the literary and oral

war over this seminal event in black history. They bristled at the idea of living in a new

United States that outlawed slavery and accepted African Americans as both citizens and

soldiers.

Copperheads amplified the argument set forth by Confederates that emancipation

was tantamount to a Second Haitian Revolution. A writer in the New York Herald asked

if abolitionists “ever seriously considered the effect of their insane proposition?”

Throughout the South, slaves commonly outnumbered whites. Once free, they would feel

“entitled to be members of Congress and Governors of States.” In a short time, then,

whites could “reasonably expect to see some hundred Negroes in the House of

Representatives, if not even in the Senate Chamber.” Black political rule in the South

meant that America was destined to become a laughing stock in the “eyes of wondering

nations.” Yet, this was only a secondary concern. “As the Negroes in a Southern climate

increase more rapidly than white men, it would not be long till they would have a

preponderance in numbers, and then perhaps the idea would occur to Sambo that he

Emancipation. African Slavery, the Corner-stone o f the Southern Confederacy (New York: E.D. Barker, 1862), 58.

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ought to have the entire South to himself, and that it would be well to get rid of the

whites, after the fashion of St. Domingo, so earnestly recommended by the abolition

tribe.”40 One writer lamented the consequences of emancipation, asserting that the result

would be a convulsion between the races “to which even civil war, with all its horrors,

will be but a faint parallel.” There was only one precedent available for the American

people to draw from. On Haiti, “ ‘negroes marched with spiked infants on their spears,

instead o f colors; then sawed asunder the male prisoners, and violated the females o f the

dead bodies o f their husbands. These were crimes that white Americans could scarcely

conceive, yet they were common to negroes, when perverted into what is called

freedom.” In closing, the author reiterated that the result of abolition was social

revolution leading to a “horrible and revolting war of races.”41 One New Englander

justified the secession of the Confederate states on the ground that northerners were

inflicted with a unique illness he labeled “nigger on the brain.” The only cure for this

illness was “the extinction of its intended victims.” A proclamation of emancipation

“would be immediately followed by a universal massacre of the planters and their

families . . . Union men, anti-union men, boys, girls, women, children, and all.” American

slaves and Haitian slaves were identical. “Thus there can be no reasonable doubt, but a

very legitimate and pressing dread that the fate of the whites of San Domingo is hanging

over the whites of the Southern plantations.” Lincoln’s proclamation was “a

Constitutional torch to a magazine of savagery.” “Still, the writer added, let us not

despair. The permanent character of nations is in the hands of God; and there is nothing

40 “More Successes— Expected Fall of Fort Donelson—Defeat of the Rebels in Missouri,”New York Herald, 17 February 1862. 41 Samuel F. B. Morse, William McMurray, Loring Andrews, Papers from the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge. Emancipation and its Results, no. 6 (New York: 1863), 6-7.

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He chastises so heavily as fanaticism. May His mercy save the country from the scenes of

San Domingo.”42

Copperheads set up roadblocks to stop the momentum pushing the federal

government towards a policy of emancipation. United States Congressman Samuel

Sullivan Cox rejected abolition on the grounds that colonization was impracticable. Freed

slaves remaining in the South would “re-enanct the scenes of Hayti,” bringing on “a war

of extermination between black and white,” Cox implored. “Let us heed the lesson which

history has given in other times, as to what is convenient and advantageous under similar

circumstances.” France abolished slavery, and “In less than a half century, the industry

and commerce of Hayti were annihilated; the Sabbath, the family and the school became

obsolete; the missionaries were more in danger—as the historian of the West Indies, Mr.

Edwards, says—of being eaten than of being heard.” Haiti was free, but its “freedom was

the freedom of fiends. Unschooled and undisciplined, she ran riot in her liberty.” There

was only one advantage to the career of the Haitian Revolution: “It admonishes us of

what our fate shall be, if we are launched on the same stormful sea.”43 Rejecting the

notion that the Constitution authorized the President to abolish slavery, lawyer Charles F.

Blake rejected William Whiting’s reading of the Haitian Revolution in an article tht first

appeared in a New England law journal and then as a pamphlet. Equating emancipation

with inciting slave insurrection, Blake cited the history of Haiti. What took place there

was “not warfare, but indiscriminate massacre of every age, sex and condition.” Slaves

burned every house and murdered every white man, woman, and child. They then

“garnished their fortifications with rows of the heads of their victims.” Bound by the

42 “Massacre the Natural Result of the ‘Proclamation’,”Liberator, 3 April 1863. 43 Emancipation and its Results—Is Ohio to be Africanized? Speech o f Hon. S.S. Cox, o f Ohio, Delivered in the House of Representatives, June 6, 1862 (Washington: 1862), 5, 8.

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rules of civilization, the United States government had no authority to allow and incite

slaves to commit cruelties that it did not allow its own soldiers to commit. This was the

opinion of America’s founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence, when they

complained that George III incited slave insurrections in the colonies, thus endeavoring

“to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known

rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

Returning to the Haitian Revolution, Blake affirmed that on Haiti slaves revolted before

emancipation. “At the time of the arrival of the French commissioners a vast servile war

was in progress, which had baffled the power of the government for more than two

years.” It was only in desperation that the French Commissioners “opened the prisons,

armed the slaves, and called in to their aid a band of insurgent negroes who were

ravaging the surrounding country.” Revolting slaves forced abolition upon the French

commissioners, who surrounded by uncontrollable black savages had no choice. “They in

vain sought by promises of freedom to win to their side the great army of blacks which so

long had defied their power.” Only after learning that a black commander-in-chief

intended to order all of the colony’s slaves to murder their masters, did both the French

commissioners and terrified planters sign the dreaded proclamation. It was thus

impossible to conclude “from these events that France had by her conduct afforded a

precedent for the emancipation of enemy’s slaves as a belligerent right,” Blake

concluded. “In point of fact the negroes wrested their freedom from the commissioners

by force. It was wholly unauthorized by the French government, and it was not until

several months afterwards that the abolition of slavery in the colonies was voted by the

convention.” Both the President and the United States had no authority to end slavery.44

44 Charles Frederick Blake, “Prerogative Rights and Public Law,”The Monthly Law Reporter 25, no. 3

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Copperheads who lashed out at abolitionists for destroying the republic

underscore how the transformation of the war for Union into a war over slavery left many

northerners unconverted to the principles of racial egalitarianism and national rebirth. In

the New York Herald, one writer compared northern abolitionists to the men who bore

responsibility for the Haitian Revolution and the “horrors heaped on horrors,” which the

paper considered “unfit for publication.” Haitian slaves would not have revolted if not for

instigation by abolitionists. “Were it not for fiendish white incendiaries the negroes

would have remained peaceful and happy, and the fruitful island would have continued to

prosper, instead of becoming a desolate wilderness, the abode of savages.” There was

only one way to ensure that “such horrors are not to be repeated in out own day.” The

army must prohibit the radical ideas of the abolitionists to infiltrate slaves’ quarters. “The

bloodthirsty Jacobins of the abolition school will move Heaven and earth to propagate

their diabolical ideas among the negroes, and, if permitted, will sow the seeds of future

massacres on a scale of magnitude far exceeding the tragedy of St. Domingo.”45

Copperheads found certain aspects of abolitionist rhetoric particularly vexing.

First among them was the celebration of Toussaint. They considered Phillips’s placement

of Toussaint above Washington on the list of history’s list of Great Men historical

treason. In front of an estimated crowd of 25,000 at a Democratic rally in Indianapolis,

one speaker railed against abolitionists. “Fellow citizens, what is it these mad people will

not do?” The founding father of the United States, “our own Washington, was placed

below a barbarous, brutal and treacherous negro by Wendell Phillips.” Summarizing the

version of the speech given in Washington at the Smithsonian Institute, the speaker

(January 1863): 145-50. 45 “The Blacks at Port Royal— The Dangers of Bloodthirsty Fanaticism,”New York Herald, 2 April 1862.

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continued, “Mr. Phillips concluded with a glowing eulogy upon Toussaint L’Ouverture.

He would call him a Cromwell, but he was a greater statesman than Cromwell; he would

call him a Napoleon, but he did not make his way over broken oaths like Napoleon; he

would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. Above all was the

soldier, statesman, martyr Toussaint L’Ouverture.” Phillips and his associates slandered

“the brightest characters that illustrate the pages of our history. No character, however

estimable, is safe from their attacks.”46

The issue of black soldiery was equally infuriating. In the first year of the war,

one writer admitted the difficulty facing Lincoln and the federal government in dealing

with runaway slaves. There were opportunities for contraband in the public service, “but

not as soldiers, for this expedient is suggestive of the horrid anarchy of St. Domingo.”47

A writer in the Boston Pilot asserted that the enrollment of black regiments increased the

chances of initiating a Second Haitian Revolution. Black troops would “propagate among

the slaves the sentiment of bold rebellion to their masters. Every black soldier will put, if

he can, a weapon of murder into the hands of every slave he meets; his words will be the

words of revolt; and his military appearance in itself, and military example in shooting

down rebels, will serve as excitements to horrid violence, which the slave will not pause

to resist.” The writer admitted the wrong of secession, yet reasoned that it could be

“repressed only by constitutional means.” War was wrong, but it served a purpose when

used legitimately. War was “a thing of death, of mutilation, and fire; but it has its law of

order; and when its law of order is not observed, it fails in effecting the purpose for which

46 Mass Convention o f the Democracy and Conservative Citizens of Indiana, Held at Indianapolis, July 3(fh, 1862 (Indianapolis: 1862), 13. 47 “The Potomac and the Southern Seaboard— Our Military and Political Policy,”New York Herald, 29 November 1861.

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it was waged.” The writer accused the North of transgressing the laws of civilized

warfare. “The proclamation is a fearful violation of its order. The enrollment of black

soldiers is the same. Both have the sanguinary insurrection of four millions of slaves for

their direct, for their first, and for their final consequence.” Though the federal

HO government did not intend to provoke a race war, it would undoubtedly be the result. At

a meeting of the Democratic State Central Committee in Philadelphia, one speaker

reacted with outrage to the rumors that the Union army was considering using black

soldiers. He avowed that slaves were inherently unable to endure the hardships of war,

the musketry, the artillery fire, and especially the bayonet charge. “The history of negro

wars and insurrection in St. Domingo, and other West Indian Islands, is replete with the

barbarities of rapine and slaughter of helpless women and infants, that shock the

sensibilities.” Should slaves be allowed to fight for the Union army and against the South,

“then the atrocities of the West India Islands we may naturally expect to be repeated here

on a vastly more extended scale. Against such a fiendish policy would not only the moral

sensibilities of all the whites of the Northern States who have not become brutalized by

the devilishness of Abolitionism, be more painfully shocked, but the whole civilized

world would condemn us, and probably, in the cause of humanity, rise to stay atrocities

so disgraceful.”49

Democratic leader George Ticknor Curtis argued that the decision to arm black

men destroyed the public’s widespread support for the Union army both in the North and

internationally. “What we are doing now—organizing and arming negroes, forming negro

48 “Massacre, the Natural Result of the ‘Proclamation’,”Boston Pilot, printed in Liberator, 3 April 1863. 49 Address of the Democratic State Central Committee. Together with the Proceedings of the Democratic State Convention, Held at Harrisburg, July 4, 1862, and the Proceedings of the Democratic State Central Committee, Held at Philadelphia. July 29, 1862 (Philadelphia: F.W. Hughes, 1862), 13.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Battalions, Regiments, and Brigades—is but outraging public sentiment. All Europe is

crying out against it. The whole civilized world shrinks from and abhors any prospect of

the repetition of the bloody scenes of Hayti and St. Domingo.” For years, Europeans

considered the United States the model republic. They now “turned with horror from

white men cooperating with African slaves to shed fraternal blood.” Having lost the

world’s hope, “we can have no hope in ourselves, until we retreat from this disgraceful

exhibition of twenty millions of white men calling on four millions of negroes to fight

eight millions, at the most, of white fellow-men.”50 In the United States House of

Representatives, Charles Biddle of Pennsylvania expressed dismay at the abolitionist

sentiment spreading throughout the North. “I differ wholly from those who look upon the

present as a ‘golden hour;’ who regard it with exultation as the dawn of a black

millennium. In me, their hopes and schemes inspire disgust and horror.” The idea of

slaves proving valiant soldiers was preposterous. “Of the slave you cannot make a

soldier; you may make an assassin. But the shrieks of white households murdered, and

worse than murdered, by the negro, would appall the hearts and palsy the arms of more of

the supporters of this war than all the race of Ham could take the place of.” Northerners

must reject a “black alliance,” for such an enterprise “offers to northern white men a

fellowship that most of them abhor; it proffers to the southern white man no terms that he

prefers to extermination—it proffers negro equality or negro domination; it drives the

Union men of the South into the ranks of the enemy.” Arming slaves opened the door to

“a dreary prospect of a protracted, devastating, ruinous guerilla warfare; it shocks the

sentiment of the white race throughout the world.” Biddle concluded his diatribe, offering

50 The True Conditions o f American Loyalty: a Speech Delivered by George Ticknor Curtis, Before the Democratic Union Association, March 28th, 1863 (New York, 1863), 13.

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a hint as to where his national and racial loyalties lie: “Bom and bred on the soil of the

State, whose proudest title is to be ‘the Keystone of the Federal arch,’ I do not wish to see

a new St Domingo on her southern border. These are my sentiments as a Pennsylvanian

and a white man.”51

Copperheads’ racial identification with Confederates appears most evident in the

“miscegenation” scare of 1864, when Democratic journalists anonymously published a

pamphlet promoting race mixing, and ascribed its authorship to the Republican Party.

The controversial pamphlet and the literary dialogue it opened demonstrates the

conviction among Copperheads that the greatest fear of the abolition of slavery lie not in

the physical violence done towards white men, rather the sexual violation to white

women. Using a sarcastic and patronizing tone, the authors of Miscegenation: The Theory

o f the Blending o f the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro celebrated

the Emancipation Proclamation as they pondered the future of the white and black races

in America. They then turned their attention to black soldiery. Emancipation was only

“the first step towards the redemption of the black and his absorption with the white. The

second step is in making him a soldier of the United States. If he has fought beside the

white, if he has spilled his blood for the common country, the most ordinary sense of

justice will revolt at the idea of remanding him back to slavery, or of denying him any

opportunity or right accorded to his white comrade.” The authors insisted that even

unskilled slaves would perform adequately as soldiers. What the army especially needed

now was black officers: “It will be a sad misfortune if this war should end without a

battle being fought by a black general in command of a white or mixed body of troops.

51 The Alliance With the Negro: Speech of Hon Charles J. Biddle,of PA, Delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, March 6, 1862 (Washington: L. Towers & Co., 1862), 2, 4, 8.

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We want an American Toussaint L’Ouverture, to give the black his proper position on

this continent, and the day is coming.” The war’s end was not as close as people

presumed. The Confederacy would continue to resist until at last black soldiers forced

them to submit. Appointed by the government supreme, the former slaves would rule the

South. “The slave of yesterday not only is the soldier of to-day, but is destined to be the

conqueror of to-morrow.”52

The Haitian Revolution appeared routinely in the dialogue on miscegenation.

Garret Davis remarked, “I know the nature of slavery, of that population. There have

been contemplated slave insurrections in Virginia; some in the State of Kentucky. We all

know the extent of the outrages that ensued in the insurrection of the slaves of San

Domingo.” There was a general law regarding relation between whites and blacks. “The

black race desires the white race; and whenever there is an insurrection generally select in

anticipation for themselves the handsomest and most attractive white women for their

wives. That is a law of the race; and wherever there is an extensive insurrection, and

violence and passion and lust obtain the ascendant, the outrageous enormities that are and

will be perpetrated by the black race are fearful and too horrid to narrate.”53 A

correspondent in the New York Herald wrote of the possibility of forty to fifty “nigger”

regiments, “each of which will, no doubt, in due time, furnish its quota of Toussaint

L’Ouvertures.” He expected great things from this new experiment in military

amalgamation. “Whether it will change ‘the Ethio’s skin’ to white or convert the white

man’s skin to black remains to be tested. The experiment would have a fairer chance,

52 [David Goodman and George Wakeman],Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton & co., 1864), 56-57. 53 Speech o f Hon. Garret Davis, o f Kentucky, on the State o f the Union; in Which He Have a Sketch o f the Political History of Massachusetts. Delivered in the Senate of the United States, February 16 & 17, 1864 (Washington: L. Towers & co., 1864), 29-31.

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perhaps, if a few of our string minded women were apportioned to each brigade.”54 A

writer in the Boston Pilot implored, “Do we want another San Domingo to be repeated in

the South? Have we no horror at seeing the females of the South treated in a manner and

in circumstances too shocking to name, by the slaves of the plantations? Are we to save

the history of the Republic from the broad, indelible disfigurement of the massacre, lust,

conflagration and sacrilege on a white minority, committed by four millions of Africans

in wild, unbridled license from every law?” Confederates committed treason, but surely

they were not deserving of this.55

The notorious white supremacist publisher John H. Van Evrie blamed

abolitionists for the increasing likelihood of miscegenation. “No matron in the South ever

heard the names of Garrison or John Brown uttered without clasping more closely the

child on her bosom, not from any personal fear of these men, but from that instinct of

self-preservation God has endowed her with, and which taught her that the ‘idea’

connected with these names involved the extinction of her blood.” The Haitian

Revolution portended indescribable horrors for the United States. The decree of French

National Convention of 1792 resulted in the “impartial freedom,” for the island’s slaves,

“but the twenty-five thousand whites of that island resisted this monstrous crime to the

uttermost. The result was that the negroes, stimulated by British and outside agents, and

led on my mongrel chiefs, exterminated the whites, not one man, woman, or child being

left of that island to tell the tale of their destruction.” Everywhere emancipation meant the

same, even in Jamaica where the end of slavery came peacefully. White Jamaicans “were

overcome, not by physical force, but by the corrupt and perverse opinions of England

54 “Nigger Regiments,”New York Herald, 22 May 1863. 55 “Massacre, the Natural Result of the ‘Proclamation,’ ”Boston Pilot, printed in Liberator, 3 April 1863.

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embodied in the Parliament.” The result was “social equality, amalgamation, mongrelism,

and rapidly approaching extinction of the white blood. A few years hence this hideous

process must complete itself, and the white element as utterly disappear from Jamaica as

it has from Hayti.” The only difference was the method of extinction. The threat of

miscegenation throughout the United States was just as real. What was the solution? It

was the destiny of white Americans to extend the existing boundaries of the United States

“to the equator, and, perhaps, over the whole continent, and with a government of white

men we shall preserve the purity of our blood, the unity of our nationality with the

integrity of our Republican system, and save American civilization from the blight and

desolation now resting on the mongrel Republics South of us, and which God has decreed

forever, as the penalty for disregarding the distinctions and natural relations of races.”56

Copperhead fears of emancipation, black soldiery, and miscegenation combined

in a song that parodied the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution. Included in

the popular songbook Copperhead Minstrels and entitled “De Serenade,” it deserves

quotation in its entirety:

Get de bones and get de banjo, get de soundin’ tamborine, When de ‘casion calls for moosic, you can count did nigger in; And I feels de glow inspirin’, as de instruments I take, For de ‘casion is a serenade for Massa Linkin’s sake. Oh, limber up de finger, Let the Serenade begin; When de ‘casion calls for moosic, You can count dis nigger in. Oh, de Sangomingo darkeys had a standard which dey bore; ‘Twas a pretty little baby’s head, all dripping in its gore; And if we undahstand aright de President’s Proclaim, He tells de Dixie niggers day may go and do de same. Oh, limber up de fingers,

56 John H. van Evrie,Abolition and Secession; or, Cause and Effect, Together with the Remedy for Our Sectional Troubles. By a Unionist. Anti-Abolition Tracts. No. 1 (New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co., 1862), 12, 23-24.

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Let de serenade begin; When de ‘casion calls for moosic, You can count dis nigger in. Oh, de Sangomingo darkies, dare old Massas took and tied, And den dey got de handsaw and sawed ‘em till dey died; And after dey had sawed ‘em till dey sawed away dare lives, You may bet dey had a good time a kissin’ ob dare wives. And if we undahstand him, Massa Linkin makes proclaim, Dat de niggers down in Dixie Have a right to do de same. Massa Beecher, Massa Cheever, you must set apart a day, And get your Congo-rations for the handsaws for to pay, De little baby’s curly head, ourselves can easy get, And spike it do de standard while it’s dripping warm and wet! On the old plantation homestead, Waits de wo widout a name, If darkies undahstand aright The President’s proclaim. Oh, wake up Massa Linkin, for the night is not far spent, And hear de free Americans ob African descent, Wid de bones and wid de banjo, and de soundin’ tamborine, We have come to serenade you ere de sawin’ we begin. We have come to serenade you, Ere we raise, with life-blood red, De Sangomingo standard Of de little baby’s head.57

The proslavery narrative of the Haitian Revolution proved resilient among white

northerners. Even after American slaves responded to freedom with dignity and without

violence, the Apocalyptical Model instructed the enemies of the freedmen. It would

continue to do so throughout Reconstruction. Two documents published by Van Evrie

shortly after the war illuminate this trajectory. In the Democratic Almanac , Van Evrie

devoted nearly twenty pages to reprinting large sections of Bryan Edwards’s narrative of

the “horrors of St. Domingo.” A note attached at the end of the text indicates the multiple

uses to which the Haitian Revolution was still available. Van Evrie resented the

57 Copperhead Minstrel. A Choice Collection of Democratic Poems and Songs, for the Use of Political Clubs and the Social Circle, 4th ed. (New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co, 1867), 35-37.

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abolitionist-inspired movement to bring about racial equality, writing of the Haitian

Revolution, “this monstrous and wholesale murder was committed by the French

Convention in utter ignorance of what they were dealing with, and therefore, when

contrasted with what the people of the Northern States have done and are now striving to

do at the South, seems almost forgivable by future generations, though every drop of

blood shed, every life destroyed, and every hour of torture and horror suffered in that

awful catastrophe, must cling to their skirts forever.” There were no words to express “the

unalterable and unfathomable crime of those who, having seen negroes all their lives, and

with the transcendent horror of St. Domingo straight before them, are now striving to

force the same doom on the South, and compel eight millions of their own race, and four

millions of negroes, to exterminate each other!”58 Van Evrie elaborated on his fears of

miscegenation and racial holocaust in Abolition is National Death. The transformation of

slaves into citizens—the social and political equal of whites—signaled the end of both

civilization and the United States. National death was as inevitable as death in the

aftermath of the onset of a mortal disease. Equality meant miscegenation, but since white

southerners, the “descendents of the men of 1776,” refused to “amalgamate” with their

former slaves, Van Evrie predicted “a conflict of race, as in San Domingo.” In the regions

of the South where whites were in the majority, the black race would vanish. Where

blacks were in the majority, the opposite would occur. The great republican experiment

would draw to a close: “all the country south of 36.30 substantially will become and must

become what Hayti is now, and as utterly lost to American civilization as if swallowed up

by an earthquake.” This was the “final end, the unavoidable result, the inexorable

necessity, the unescapable doom of the American people.” Every man and women who

58 The Democratic Almanac (New York: Van Evrie, Horton, and Co., 1868), 35.

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accepted either the abolition of slavery or the equality of the races invited these

consequences. The choice was simple: “amalgamation or extermination.'"59

That the images of the Apocalyptical Model of the Haitian Revolution resonated

so strongly throughout the Civil War as well as in its aftermath, testifies to the depths of

the shadows that the Haitian Revolution cast over the Atlantic world for more than a half

century. It moreover demonstrates the cross-sectional racial alliance that survived the war

that ended slavery in the United States. Copperheads and Confederates shared the same

racialist fears, in spite of section. Both refused to allow the transformation of the United

States into a racially egalitarian society. Though Confederates remembered the Haitian

Revolution in order to build a new nation, and Copperheads remembered it to keep theirs

from demolishing, the political gulf separating these two constituencies was

surmountable. That a milestone event in African American history formed the bedrock of

both nationalist movements, however, illustrates the plasticity of historical memory. It

moreover explains why at the end of the war neither Copperheads nor Confederates

secured their nationalistic dreams. Both groups undermined their own causes whenever

they invoked the slave revolution that so many remembered differently. Nevertheless,

though the Civil War ended slavery, it failed to complete the transition of the United

States into a racially egalitarian society. To the contrary, it merely launched the first

major offensive of an unending battle that still rages today.

59 John H. van Evrie,Abolition is National Death; or, the Attempt to Equalize Races. The Destruction of Society. Anti-Abolition Tracts. No. 1 (New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co., 1868), 25-29.

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CONCLUSION

In 1893, more than twenty seven million people from the United States and

around the world traveled to Chicago, Illinois to experience the World’s Columbian

Exposition.1 The World’s Fair, which organizers intended to mark the four hundredth

anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World came a year late; nevertheless, it

was a smashing success. The event was a testament to American ingenuity, technology,

and wealth. It was, moreover, an affirmation of the reconstructed American nation. The

fair symbolized the sectional reconciliation that had taken place in the three decades since

the Civil War. On the eve of a new century, some maintained that the future had never

been as bright for the United States of America.

One speaker who attended the exposition refused to share in the spirit of optimism

and amusement that pervaded Chicago. Frederick Douglass traveled to the “windy city”

to open old wounds. He came to discuss the painful issues of race, slavery, and war. In

front of an estimated 1500 spectators at Quinn Chapel, home to the oldest black

congregation in the city, he conjured some of the old memories of his listeners by

reminding them of the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the United States. “From the

beginning of our century until now,” Douglass pronounced, “Haiti and its inhabitants

1 Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book o f the Fair: an Historical and Descriptive Presentation of the World's Science, Art, and Industry, as Viewed Through the Columbia Exposition at Chicago in 1893 (Chicago: Bancroft Co., 1893), 957. 244

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under one aspect or another, have, for various reasons, been very much in the thoughts of

the American people. While slavery existed amongst us, her example was a sharp thorn in

our side and a source of alarm and terror.” Bom in blood, Americans thought of Haiti as a

hell of unthinkable horror. “Her very name was pronounced with a shudder. She was a

startling and frightful surprise and a threat to all slave-holders throughout the world, and

the slave-holding world has had its questioning eye upon her career ever since.” Douglass

reminded African Americans in his audience of the special importance of the revolution

for them. “We should not forget that the freedom you and I enjoy to-day . . . is largely

due to the brave stand taken by the black sons, of Haiti ninety years ago.” Haitian slaves

fought not only for themselves. “They were linked and interlinked with their race, and

striking for their freedom, they struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.”

Haiti taught the entire world a valuable lesson, of “the danger of slavery and the value of

liberty.”2

More than a century removed from the first outbreak of rebellion in the northern

plains of Saint Domingue, this former slave, abolitionist, army recmiter, and diplomat,

did not forget the Haitian Revolution. And he was not alone. Decades after the Civil War,

African Americans fought a losing battle to keep alive the memory of the Haitian

Revolution. It was not due to a lack of effort. Black historians served on the front lines of

the battle to keep the Haitian Revolution alive in American memory. Robert C. O.

Benjamin, Charles W. Mossell, and David Augustus Straker are among those who

published either biographies of Toussaint or general histories of the Haitian Revolution at

2 Frederick Douglass, Lecture on Haiti (Washington, D.C.: Violet Agents Supply Co., 1893), 33-35. The fair included a Haitian pavilion, which included relics of the revolution, including a portrait of Toussaint along with one of his rapiers. Book o f the Fair, 918.

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the close of the nineteenth century.3 George Washington Williams and W. E. B. Du Bois

made both central themes in their works. Williams Wells Brown's early lecture on

Toussaint, along with his more famous anthology of Great Men survived in a revised

collection entitled, Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancement o f the Colored

Race.4 A spate of print culture at the turn of the twentieth century illuminates the effort of

black writers to vindicate the greatness of the race by offering short lives of numerous

black Great Men throughout history, and especially Toussaint.5 His memory proved

resilient in serving as the synecdoche of the Haitian Revolution. African Americans, in

the words of Straker, set out to “perpetuate the memory” of Toussaint and the Haitian

Revolution, understanding that as distance increased between themselves and the war that

ended slavery, and the issues of black civil rights faded, “the negro must be himself his

own historian.”6 Their efforts had changed little since the middle of the nineteenth

century, when James Theodore Holly wrote, “never let the self emancipating deeds of the

Haytian people be effaced; never let her heroically achieved nationality be brought low;

3 Robert C. O. Benjamin, Life o f Toussaint L'Ouverture, Warrior and Statesman, with an Historical Survey o f the Island o f San Domingo from the Discovery o f the Island by Christopher Columbus, in 1492, to the Death o f Toussaint, in 1803 (Los Angeles: Evening Express Print, 1888); Charles W. Mossell,Toussaint L ’Ouverture, the Hero o f Saint Domingo, Soldier, Statesman, Martyr: or, Hayti's Struggle, Triumph, Independence, and Achievements (Lockport, New York: Ward & Cobb, 1896); David Augustus Straker, Reflections on the Life and Times o f Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Negro Haytien, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Ruler Under the Dominion of France, and Author of the Independence of Hayti (Columbia, South Carolina: Charles A. Calvo, Jr., 1886). 4 William Wells Brown, The Rising Son; or, the Antecedents and Advancement o f the Colored Race (Boston: A. G. Brown & Co.), 1874, 5 Benjamin Griffith Brawley, The Negro Genius; a New Appraisal of the Achievement of the American Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts (New York: Dodd Mead & Company, 1937); John Edward Bruce, Short Biographical Sketches of Eminent Negro Men and Women in Europe and the United States with Brief Extracts from Their Writings and Public Utterances (Yonkers, New York: Gazette Press, 1910); Charles C. Dawson, ABC's of Great Negroes (Chicago: Dawson Publishers, 1933); William Henry Ferris, The African Abroad, or, His Evolution in Western Civilization Tracing His Development under Caucasian Milieu (New Haven, Connecticut: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Press, 1913); William Henry Quick,Negro Stars in All Ages o f the World (Henderson, North Carolina: D. E. Aycock, 1890); William J. Simmons,Men o f Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (Cleveland: G. M. Rewell, 1887). 6 Straker,Life and Times of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Preface.

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no, never let the names of her Toussaint, her Dessalines, her Rigaud, her Cristophe, and

n her Petion be forgotten, or blotted out from the historic pages of the world's history.”

Black writers though isolated were not completely alone in waging this history

war. A small contingent of sympathetic white writers continued to insist upon the

relevance of the Haitian Revolution for the United States. Most prominent among them

was the famed American historian and writer Henry Adams, who descended from a long

line of men opposed to the institution of slavery. Adams’s great grandfather and

grandfather were Presidents who objected to the expansion of slavery. Furthermore, both

publicly sympathized with the outcome of the Haitian Revolution. During the Civil War,

Adams's brother, Charles Francis, Jr., ended the Adams’ tradition of speaking out against

slavery and instead did something about it, by serving as an officer of a black military

unit, the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry. The family was, Adams remembered proudly, as

“anti-slavery by birth, as their name was Adams and their home was Quincy.”8 In his

celebrated history of the United States published in 1890, Adams remarked on the

national forgetting that had taken place regarding the Haitian Revolution and its

preeminent founding father. “The story of Toussaint Louverture,” he lamented, “has been

told almost as often as that of Napoleon, but not in connection with the history of the

United States, although Toussaint exercised on their history as decisive as that of any

European ruler.”9 Though many of the radical white abolitionists who served as architects

of the public memory of the Haitian Revolution during the Civil War had passed, their

words reverberated in American print culture more than a half-century later. Publishers

7 James Theodore Holly, “Thoughts on Hayti,”Anglo-African Magazine I, no. 6 (June 1859): 186. 8 Henry Adams,The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Modem Library, 1931), 25. 9 Henry Adams,History of the United States of American During the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1889), 378.

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and editors reprinted Phillips's oration multiple times.10 Charles Wyllys's New York City

lecture reappeared in a popular collection of essays written by “great historians.”11

While it is clear that at the turn of the twentieth century the memory of the Haitian

Revolution survived in various venues, many Americans had forgotten. In the decades

since the Civil War, public memory of the Haitian Revolution had dissipated along with

that of the Civil War itself. While the wounds of the latter remained fresh in the minds of

veterans and their families, for most it had like the Haitian Revolution, become a distant

memory. The painful recollections of nearly five years of both private and public

suffering and sacrifice were routinely forgotten. As the nineteenth century came to a

close, however, and the Civil War nearly disappeared into the horizon, the American

people embarked upon a massive collective remembering. Centering their memories on

the sentimental and romantic aspects of the war—as opposed to its ideological causes and

effects—they remembered the Civil War in an effort to build a powerful and

unprecedented national consensus. Northerners and southerners sacrificed the memories

of the ideology of the Civil War on the altar of a cross-sectional alliance. Though

sectional reconciliation had its benefits, it also, writes David Blight, “had its cost.”12

While today the Civil War occupies a place in American memory as conspicuous and

perhaps even more than any other historical event, there is a hole where the Haitian

Revolution once inhabited.

10 Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, 2 vols. (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1892);Toussaint L'Ouverture: An Address by Wendell Phillips, Delivered at New York, March 11, 1863. Revised by Carrie Chapman Catt. (Cleveland: Re well Publishing Co., 1891). 11 Rossiter Johnson, Charles F. Home, and John Rudd,The Great Events by Famous Historians: A Comprehensive and Readable Account of the World’s History, vol. 17 ([New York]: The National Alumni, 1905), 236-51. 12 David Blight,Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2001), 389.

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In the middle of the nineteenth century, the American people fought a war to

determine both the fate of nearly four million enslaved African Americans as well as the

future of the nation. Lacking a reservoir of national memory of slave revolt and

revolution on which to draw, they remembered the other war over slavery that matched

the Civil War in both intensity and violence. Slaves, abolitionists, secessionists,

Confederates, and Copperheads all struggled to come to grips with their own history by

calling upon the history of Haiti. From all walks of life, of various races, classes, and

genders, they remembered the Haitian Revolution to better cope with the crisis that

confronted them. During the Civil War, the Haitian Revolution meant more to the

American people than ever before.

When African Americans seized the moment and began to win their freedom by

both walking off plantations and joining the ranks of the Union Army, a Second Haitian

Revolution seemed imminent. It never happened. Throughout the duration of the war,

slaves and black soldiers failed to replicate the unspeakable acts of vengeance perpetrated

by Haitian slaves. They were as disciplined, heroic, and as successful in securing freedom

as was Toussaint and the countless members of his army who marched into battle beside

him. It was because of the actions of America's Slave Soldiers that by the time of the

war's conclusion, the Heroic Model of the Haitian Revolution had surpassed the

Apocalyptical Model as the dominant narrative in American memory. Though

Confederates and Copperheads proved stubborn rememberers, in American culture the

memory of black heroism and manhood attended the triumph of the Union army and the

United States government, at the expense of the memory of the “horrors of St. Domingo.”

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Ironically, in spite of the bifurcated and contested narrative of the Haitian

Revolution, the various constituencies who fought over the memory of the most

successful slave revolt in history shared something in common: they all used a landmark

event in African American history to buttress their nationalistic dreams. Slaves,

abolitionists, secessionists, Confederates, and Copperheads all used the Haitian

Revolution as a touchstone, in spite of their divergent views on such important issues as

race, slavery, and nation. Though never reaching a consensus, they all drank from the

same cup. History taught that slavery was an impermanent institution. Slaves would

accept freedom or take it in their own bloody hands. After emancipation, as the issues of

war and black freedom faded into the past, the national forgetting began. The removal of

both slavery and the concomitant threat of slave revolt meant a dramatic decline of the

viability of the Haitian Revolution. In this case, the national amnesia developed over this

iconic event developed quickly. While the national trauma of sectional violence and war

sparked the remembrance of the Haitian Revolution, its end spelled the end of the popular

need for the Haitian Revolution as well.

The national forgetting of the Haitian Revolution at the end of the nineteenth

century indicates how far black history and culture had receded from the American mind.

While during a defining moment in American history the Haitian Revolution informed

Americans' ideas of race and nation, it now served primarily to bolster black racial pride.

Once at the center of American memory, this landmark event in black history had moved

to the periphery. While the genre of history maintained its status in determining the

ideological construction of America, black history was now relegated to a sub-genre.

That the forgetting of the Haitian Revolution attended both the declining importance of

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the struggle for black rights and equality and the rise of legalized racial segregation is not

surprising. Not since the Civil War had these issues registered as high on the national

agenda. In trying to predict when the American people will again need to remember the

Haitian Revolution, it is wise to remember what Toussaint Louverture announced to his

captors two centuries ago, “In overthrowing me, you have cut down only the trunk of the

tree of liberty. It will spring up again by the roots, for they are numerous and deep.”

There is no denying that those roots still lie dormant beneath the surface of the earth.

There is no telling when they will, along with the memory of Toussaint and the Haitian

Revolution, resurface.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Newspapers and Magazines

American Literary Gazette and Publisher’s Circular Anglo-African Magazine Athanaeum Atlantic Monthly Boston Commonwealth Boston Quarterly Review Christian Examiner and General Review Christian Recorder Colored American Charleston Mercury Chicago Tribune Daily South Carolinian De Bow’s Review Detroit Free Press Dial Douglass’s Monthly Evening Transcript Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper Freedom’s Journal Genius o f Universal Emancipation Godey’s Lady Book Harper’s Monthly Harper’s Weekly The Historical Magazine, and Notes and Queries Concerning the Antiquities Liberator Memphis Appeal Monthly Law Reporter National Anti-slavery Standard New Bedford Mercury New Orleans L ’Union New York Evening Post New York Globe New York Herald New York Independent New York Sun New York Times New York Tribune New York Weekly Anglo-African New York World New Yorker

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Newark [Ohio] North American North American Review Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch Pine and Palm Putnam’s Monthly Magazine o f American Literature, Science and Art Richmond Enquirer Richmond Examiner Staunton Spectator Vanity Fair Washington Daily National Intelligencer Weekly Anglo-African

Books, Pamphlets, and Published Primary Sources

Adams, Henry Gardiner. God’s Image in Ebony: Being a Series o f Biographical Sketches, Facts, Anecdotes, etc. Demonstrative o f the Mental Powers and Intellectual Capacities o f the Negro Race. London: Partridge and Oakey, 1854.

Address o f the Democratic State Central Committee. Together With the Proceedings o f the Democratic State Convention, Held at Harrisburg, July 4, 1862. and the Proceedings o f the Democratic State Central Committee, Held at Philadelphia. July 29, 1862. Philadelphia: F.W. Hughes, 1862.

Alison, Archibald. History o f Europe, from the Commencement o f the French Revolution in 1789, to the Restoration o f the Bourbons in 1815. 4 Vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1852.

Anderson, James Harvey. Biographical Souvenir Volume o f the Twenty-Third Quadrennial Session o f the General Conference o f the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Philadelphia: Big Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church, 1908,138-39.

Armistead, Wilson. A Tribute for the Negro: Being a Vindication o f the Moral, Intellectual, and Religious Capabilities o f The Colored Portion o f Mankind; With Particular Reference to the African Race. Illustrated by Numerous Biographical Sketches, Facts, Anecdotes, etc. and Many Superior Portraits and Engravings. New York: W. Harned, Anti-Slavery Office, 1848. Reprint, Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing, Inc., 1969.

Avirett, James Battle. The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin Before the War. New York: F. Tennyson Neely Company, 1901.

Baker, James Loring. Slavery. Philadelphia: John A. Norton, 1860.

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Bancroft, Hubert Howe. The Book o f the Fair: an Historical and Descriptive Presentation o f the World’s Science, Art, and Industry, as Viewed Through the Columbia Exposition at Chicago in 1893. Chicago: Bancroft Co., 1893.

Beard, John Relly. The Life o f Toussaint L ’Ouverture: The Negro Patriot of Hayti: Comprising an Account o f the Struggle for Liberty in the Island, and A Sketch of its History to the Present Period. London, Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853. Reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Negro Universities Press, 1970.

Bell, Howard, ed., Black Separatism and the Caribbean 1860. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970.

Benjamin, Robert C. O. Life o f Toussaint L ’Ouverture, Warrior and Statesman, With an Historical Survey o f the Island o f San Domingo from the Discovery o f the Island by Christopher Columbus, in 1492, to the Death o f Toussaint, in 1803. Los Angeles: Evening Express Print, 1888.

Biddle, Charles J. The Alliance With the Negro: Speech o f Hon Charles J. Biddle,of PA, Delivered in the House o f Representatives o f the United States, March 6, 1862. Washington: L. Towers & Co., 1862.

Bigelow, John. Jamacia in 1850. or, The Effects o f Sixteen Years o f Freedom on a Slave Colony. New York: George P. Putnam, 1851; reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Negro Universities Press, 1970.

______. Retrospections o f an Active Life. 5 Vols. New York: Baker & Taylor Co., 1909.

Bird, Mark Baker. The Black Man; or Haytian Independence. Deduced from Historical Notes and Dedicated to the Government and People o f Hayti. New York: M. B. Bird, 1869.

Blair, Samuel Steel. Speech o f Hon. S.S. Blair, o f Pennsylvania, Delivered in the House o f Rep, Thursday, May 22, 1862, on House Bills nos. 471 and 472, for the Confiscation o f the Property and the Emancipation o f the Slaves o f Rebels. Washington, D.C.: Scammell & Co., 1862.

Brawley, Benjamin Griffith. The Negro Genius; a New Appraisal o f the Achievement of the American Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts. New York: Dodd Mead & Company, 1937.

Brown, William Wells. The Rising Son; or, the Antecedents and Advancement o f the Colored Race. Boston: A. G. Brown & Co., 1874.

______. The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius and His Achievements. New York: Thomas Hamilton, 1863.

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______. St. Domingo: its Revolutions and its Patriots. A Lecture, Delivered Before the Metropolitan Athenceum, London, May 16, and at St. Thomas’ Church, Philadelphia, December 20, 1854. Boston: Bela marsh, 1855.

Bruce, John Edward Bruce. Short Biographical Sketches o f Eminent Negro Men and Women in Europe and the United States With Brief Extracts from Their Writings and Public Utterances. Yonkers, New York: Gazette Press, 1910.

Bulfinch, Stephen G. Honor; or, The Slave-Dealer’s Daughter. Boston: William V. Spence, 1864.

Campbell, John. Negro-Mania: Being an Examination o f the Falsely Assumed Equality o f the Various Races o f Men. Philadelphia: Campbell & Power, 1851.

Catt, Carrie Chapman, ed. Toussaint L ’Ouverture: An Address by Wendell Phillips, Delivered at New York, March 11, 1863. Cleveland: Rewell Publishing Co., 1891.

Cheever, George Barrell. Rights o f the Colored Race to Citizenship and Representation; and the Guilt and Consequences o f Legislation Against Them: a Discourse Delivered in the Hall o f Representatives o f the United States, in Washington, D.C., May 19, 1864. New York: Francis & Loutrel, 1864.

Chenery, William H. The Fourteenth Regiment (Colored): In the War to Preserve the Union, 1861-1865. Snow & Famham, Printers and Publishers, 1898. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.

Chesnut, Mary Boykin.Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. Edited by C. Vann Woodward. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

Child, Lydia Maria. The Freedmen ’s Book. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865. Reprint, New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968.

Cobbe, Frances Power.The Red Flag in John Bull’s Eyes. London: Emily Faithfull, 1863. Confederate States of America. Address o f Congress to the People o f the Confederate States. Joint Resolution in Relation to the War. Richmond, 1844.

Congressional Globe. 44 Vols. Washington: Blair & Rives, 1834-1873.

The Conscription. Also Speeches o f the Hon. W.D. Kelley, o f Pennsylvania, in the House o f Representatives, on The Conscription; The Way to Attain and Secure Peace; and on Arming the Negroes. With a Letter from Secretary Chase. Philadelphia: 1863.

Conway, Moncure Daniel. Autobiography Memories and Experiences o f Moncure Daniel Conway. 2 Vols. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904.

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______. The Rejected Stone; or, Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America. By a Native o f Virginia, 3d ed. Boston: Walker, Wise, and company, 1862.

______. The Golden Hour. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862.

Cox, Samuel Sullivan. Emancipation and its Results-Is Ohio to be Africanized? Speech o f Hon. S.S. Cox, o f Ohio, Delivered in the House o f Representatives, June 6, 1862. Washington: 1862.

Curtis, George Ticknor. The True Conditions o f American Loyalty: a Speech Delivered by George Ticknor Curtis, Before the Democratic Union Association, March 28th, 1863. New York, 1863.

Davis, Garret. Speech o f Hon. Garret Davis, o f Kentucky, on the State o f the Union; in Which He Gave a Sketch o f the Political History o f Massachusetts. Delivered in the Senate o f the United States, February 16 & 17, 1864. Washington: L. Towers & co., 1864.

Dawson, Charles C. ABC’s of Great Negroes. Chicago: Dawson Publishers, 1933.

De Fontaine, Felix Gregory. History o f American Abolitionism; its Four Great Epochs, Embracing Narratives o f the Ordinance o f1787, Compromise o f1820, Annexation o f Texas, Mexican War, Wilmot Proviso, Negro Insurrections, Abolition Riots, Slave Rescues, Compromise o f1850, Kansas Bill o f1854, John Brown Insurrection, 1859, Valuable Statistics, cfee., cfee., &c., Together With a History o f the Southern Confederacy. (Originally Published in the New York Herald). New York: D, Appleton & Co., 1861.

De Bow, James D. B. The Interest in Slavery o f the Southern Non-Slaveholder. The Right o f Peaceful Secession. The Character and Influence ofAbolitionism. Charleston: Evans & Cogswsell, 1860.

Delany, Martin R. The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny o f the Colored People o f the United States. Philadelphia: Martin Delany, 1852. Reprint, New York: Amo Press, 1968.

Douglass, Frederick. The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interveiws. Edited by John Blassingame and John R. McKivigan. 5 Vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979-92.

______. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855. Reprint, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969.

______. Lecture on Haiti. Chicago: Violet Agents Supply Co., 1893.

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Dubroca, Louis. The Life o f Toussaint Louverture: Late General in Chief and Governor o f the Island o f Saint Domingo: With Many Particulars Never Before Published: to Which is Subjoined, an Account o f the FirstOoperations o f the French Army Under General Leclerc. Charleston: T. B. Bowen, 1802.

Duganne, A. J. H. Camps and Prisons. Twenty Months in the Department o f the Gulf 2d ed. New York: J.P. Robens, Publisher, 1865.

Dumond, Dwight Lowell. Southern Editorials on Secession. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1964.

Edwards, Bryan. An Historical Survey o f the French Colony in the Island o f St. Domingo: Comprehending an Account o f the Revolt o f the Negroes in the Year 1791, and a Detail o f the Military Transactions o f the British Army in That Island, in the Years 1793 & 1794. Vol. 4, The History, Civil and Commercial, o f the British Colonies in the West Indies. Philadelphia: James Humphreys, 1806.

Elliott, Charles Wyllys.Heroes are Historic Men. St. Domingo, it’s Revolution and its Hero, Toussaint Louverture: An Historical Discourse Condensed for the New York Library Association. February 26, 1855. New York: J. A. Dix, 1855.

Elliot, E. N., ed. Cotton is King, and Pro-slavery Arguments; Comprising the Writings o f Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright, on This Important Subject. Pritchard Abbott & Loomis, 1860. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Print, 1969.

Evrie, J. H. Van. Negroes and Negro “Slavery. ” The First an Inferior Race . . . The Latter its Normal Condition. New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co., Publishers, 1861.

Fabens, Joseph Warren Fabens.In the Tropics, by a Settler in Santo Domingo. 4th ed. New York: Carleton, etc, 1863.

______. Facts About Santo Domingo: Applicable to the Present Crisis: An Address Delivered Before the American Geographical and Statistical Society at New York, April 3, 1862. New York: George Putnam, 1862.

Ferris, William Henry. The African Abroad, or, His Evolution in Western Civilization Tracing His Development under Caucasian Milieu. New Haven, Connecticut: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Press, 1913.

Florida General Assembly.House Journal - 10th Session. A Journal o f the Proceedings o f the House o f Representatives o f the General Assembly o f the State o f Florida, at Its Tenth Session, Begun and Held at the Capitol, in the City o f Tallahassee, on Monday, November 26, 1860. Tallahassee: Dyke & Carlisle, 1860.

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Foner, Philip S. ed. The Voice o f Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes in the United States, 1797-1973. New York: Capricorn Books, 1975.

______. “Address of Frederick Douglass at the Inauguration of Douglass Institute, Baltimore, October, 1865 ."Journal of Negro History 54 (April 1968): 174-183.

Forten, Charlotte. The Journal o f Charlotte Forten. Edited by Ray Allen Billington. New York: The Dryden Press, Inc., 1953.

Franklin, James. The Present State o f Hayti (Saint Domingo): With Remarks on its Agriculture, Commerce, Laws, Religion, Finances, and Population, etc., etc. London: J. Murray, 1828.

[Goodman, David, and George Wakeman], Miscegenation: The Theory o f the Blending o f the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton & co., 1864.

Goodrich, Samuel G. Peter Parley’s Pictoral History of North and South America. Illustrated With More Than One Hundred Engravings. Syracuse, New York: Peter Parley Publishing Company, 1858.

Goodwin, Daniel R. Southern Slavery in Its Present Aspects: Containing a Reply to a Late Work o f the Bishop o f Vermont on Slavery. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1864. Reprint. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.

Graham, Andrew J., and Charles B. Collar, eds. Pulpit and Rostrums, Orations, Popular Lectures, & C. Three Unlike Speeches, by William Lloyds Garrison, o f Massachusetts, Garrett Davis o f Kentucky, Alexander H. Stephens, o f Georgia. The Abolitionists, and Their Relations to the War. The War Not for Emancipation. African Slavery, the Corner-stone o f the Southern Confederacy. New York: E.D. Barker, 1862.

Gray, Thomas R. The Confessions o f Nat Turner, the Leader o f the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. Baltimore: Thomas R. Gray, 1831.

Hamilton, James. Negro Plot. An Account o f the Late Intended Insurrection Among a Portion o f the Blacks o f the City o f Charleston, South Carolina. Boston: Joseph W. Ingraham, 1822.

Harvey, William W. Sketches o f Hayti; From the Expulsion o f the French, to the Death o f Cristophe. London: L.B. Seeley and Son, 1827. Reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Negro University Press, 1970.

Hassal, Mary. [Leonora Sansay],Secret History; or, the Horrors o f St. Domingo, Written by a Lady at Cape Francois to Colonel Burr. Philadelphia: Bradford & Innskeep, 1808.

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______. Zelica, the Creole: a Novel, by an American. 3 Vols. London. W. Fearman, 1820.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. 1869. Reprint, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1984.

Holcombe, William Henry. “The Alternative: A Separate Nationality, or the Africanization of the South.” Southern Literary Messenger 32, no. 2 (February 1861): 81-88.

Hopkins, John Henry. A Scriptural, Ecclesiastical, and Historical View o f Slavery, From the Days o f the Patriarch Abraham, to the Nineteenth Century. Addressed to the Right Rev. Alonzo Potter, D.D., Bishop o f the Prot. Episcopal Church in the Diocese o f Pennsylvania. New York: W.I. Pooley, & Co., 1864. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.

Howard, York Hussars. The Haitian Journal o f Lieutenant, With an Introduction by Roger Norman Buckley. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.

Hunt, Benjamin. Remarks on Hayti as a Place of Settlement for African-Americans and on the Mulatto as a Race for the Tropics. Philadelphia: T.B. Pugh, 1860.

Hunter, Andrew. The Life, Trial, and Execution o f Captain John Brown Known as “Old Brown o f Ossawatomie, ” With a Full Account o f the Attempted Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry. New York: Robert De Witt, 1859.

Huston, Felix. Address o f Gen. Felix Huston, to the Members o f the Southern Convention, to be Held at Nashville, on the Third June, 1850. Natchez, Mississippi: Free Trade Office, 1850.

Jefferson, Thomas. The Works o f Thomas Jefferson: Collected and Edited by Paul Leicester Ford. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904-’05.

______. The Writings o f Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Lipscomb, Andrew A. Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903-1904.

______. Papers. Edited by Boyd, Julian P., et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950-2004.

Kelley, William D, and Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Elizur Wright, and William Heighton. The Equality of All Men Before the Law Claimed and Defended. Boston: Press of George C. Rand & Avery, 1865.

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Kettell, Thomas Prentice. Southern Wealth and Northern Profits: As Exhibited in Statistical Facts and Official Figures: Showing the Necessity o f Union to the Future Prosperity and Welfare o f the Republic, new ed. Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1865

______. Southern Wealth and Northern Profits. New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co., 1861.

Kirke, Edmund [James R. Gilmore]. My Southern Friends. New York: Carleton, 1863.

______. Among the Pines: or South in Secession Time. New York: J.R. Gilmore, 1862.

Lamartine, Alphonse de. Oeuvres Poetiques Completes de Lamartine. Paris: 1832. Reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

Langston, John Mercer. Freedom and Citizenship. Selected Lectures and Addresses o f Hon. John Mercer Langston, LL. D., U.S. Minister Resident at Haiti. With an Introductory Sketch By Rev. J. E. Rankin, D. D., o f Washington. Miami, Florida: Mnemosyne Publishing Inc., 1969.

______. From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol. Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1894. Reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint co., 1969.

Lee, Hannah Farnham Sawyer. Memoir o f Pierre Toussaint, Born a Slave in St. Domingo. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Company, 1854.

“Letters of Toussaint Louverture and of Edward Stevens, 1798-1800.” American Historical Review 16, no. 1 (October 1910): 64-101.

Lincoln, Abraham. Collected Works. Edited by Roy P. Balser, Marion Delores Pratt, and Lloyd A. Dunlap. 9 Vols. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55.

Longstreet, Abby Buchanan.RemySt. Remy, or The Boy in Blue. New York: J.O’Kane, 1865.

Louverture, Toussaint, Memoires du General Toussaint-L ’Ouverture: Ecrits par Lui- Meme, Pouvant Servir a I’Histoire de Sa Vie. Edited by Joseph Saint-Remy. Paris: Pagnerre, 1853.

Low, Henry R. The Governor’s Message Reviewed. By Henry R. Low. In the Senate, Jan. 28, 1863. Albany: Weed, Parson and Company, 1863.

Lowell, James Russell. The Anti-Slavery Papers o f James Russell Lowell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Company, 1902. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.

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Lundy, Benjamin. The Life, Travels and Opinions o f Benjamin Lundy, Including his Journeys to Texas and Mexico; With a Sketch o f Contemporary Events, and a Notice of the Revolution in Hayti. Philadelphia: William D. Parrish, 1847. Reprint, New York: Negro University Press, 1969.

Mackenzie, Charles. Notes on Haiti Made During a Residence in that Republic. 2 Vols. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1830. Reprint, Plymouth and London: Clarke, Doble & Brendon Ltd., 1971.

MacMahon, T. W. Cause and Contrast: An Essay on the American Crisis. Richmond, VA: West & Johnston, 1862.

Martineau, Harriet. The Hour and the Man. A Historical Romance. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841.

______. “Account of Toussaint L’Ouverture.” Monthly Supplement o f the Penny Magazine o f the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge 385, no. 7 (February 28 to March 31, 1838): 121-28.

Martyn, Carlos. Wendell Phillips: the Agitator. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1890.

Madiou, Thomas. Histoire d ’Haiti. 3 Vols. Port-au-Prince, J. Courtois, 1847-48.

Mass Convention o f the Democracy and Conservative Citizens o f Indiana, Held at Indianapolis, July 30th, 1862. Indianapolis: 1862.

Maunder, Samuel. The History o f the Word: Comprising a General History, Both Ancient and Modern, o f All the Principal Nations o f the Globe, Their Rise, Progress, Present Condition, etc. 2 Vols. New York: H. Bill, 1854

M’Kim, J. Miller. The Freedmen o f South Carolina. An Address Delivered by J. Miller M ’Kim, in Sansom Hall, July 9th, 1862. Together With a Letter From the Same to Stephen Colwell, esq., Chairman o f the Port Royal Relief Committee. Philadelphia: W. P. Hazard, 1862.

Michaud, Joseph Fr. Biographie Universelle, Ancienne et Moderne. Nouvelle ed. Paris: Michaud, 1854; Granz, Austria: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1968.

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Moore, Thomas Vemer. God Our Refuge and Strength in this War. A Discourse Before the Congregations o f the First and Second Presbyterian Churches, on the Day o f Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer, Appointed by President Davis, Friday, November 15, 1861. Richmond: W. Hargrave White, 1861.

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Morris, Robert Charles, ed., [Freedman’s Third Reader] Freedmen’s Schools and Textbooks, an AM Reprint Series. Boston: American Tract Society, 1865-66. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1980.

Morse, and Samuel F. B., and William McMurray and Loring Andrews. Papers From the Society for the Diffusion o f Political Knowledge. Emancipation and its Results No. 6. New York: 1863.

Mossell, Charles W. Toussaint L ’Ouverture, the Hero o f Saint Domingo, Soldier, Statesman, Martyr: or, Hayti’s Struggle, Triumph, Independence, and Achievements. Lockport, New York: Ward & Cobb, 1896.

Nell, William Cooper, The Colored Patriots o f the American Revolution. Boston: R.F. Walcut, 1855.

Palmer, Benjamin Morgan. The South, Her Peril, and Her Duty; a Discourse, Delivered in the First Presbyterian Church, New Orleans, on Thursday, November 29, 1860. New Orleans: True Witness and Sentinel, 1860.

Parham, Althea de Puech. My Odyssey: Experience o f a Young Refugee From Two Revolutions. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959.

Payne, Daniel Alexander. Recollections o f Seventy Years. Nashville: A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1888.

Phillips, Wendell. Disunions: Two Discourses at Music Hall, On January 20th, and February 17th, 1861. Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1861.

______. Speeches, Lectures, and Letters. Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1872.

Pratt, Frances Hammond. La Belle Zoa; or, The Insurrection o f Hayti. Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1853.

Proceeding at the Mass Meeting o f Loyal Citizens, on Union Square, New York. 15th Day o f July, 1862. New York: George F. Nesbitt & Co., 1862.

Quick, William Henry. Negro Stars in All Ages o f the World. Henderson, North Carolina: D. E. Aycock, 1890.

Rainsford, Marcus. An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti: Comprehending a View of the Principal Transactions in the Revolution of Saint Domingo; With its Antient and Modern State. London: James Cundee, 1805.

______. St. Domingo, or An Historical, Political and Military Sketch of the Black Republic, With a View o f the Life and Character o f Toussaint L ’Ouverture, and the Effects o f His Newly Established Dominion in That Part o f the World. London: R. B. Scott, 1802.

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______. A Memoir o f Transactions that Took Place in St. Domingo in the Spring of 1799 Affording an Idea o f the Present State o f that Country, the real character o f its black governor, Touissant L ’Ouverture, and the Safety o f our West-India Islands From Attack or Revolt; Including the Rescue o f a British Officer Under Sentence of Death. London: R. B. Scott, 1802.

Redpath, James. Toussaint L ’Ouverture: Biography and Autobiography. Boston: James Redpath, 1863.

______. A Guide to Hayti. Boston: Haytian Bureau of Migration, 1861.

______. Roving Editor; or, Talks With Slaves in the Southern States. Edited by John R. McKivigan. New York: A. B. Burdick, 1859; reprint, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

Reese, George H. Proceedings o f the VA State Convention o f 1861. 4 Vols. Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1965.

Ripley, C. Peter, ed., and Rossbach, Jeffrey, ass. ed.,The Black Abolitionist Papers. 5 Vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985-1992.

Robinson, John Bell. Pictures of Slavery and Anti-Slavery. Advantages of Negro Slavery and the Benefits o f Negro Freedom. Morally, Socially, and Politically Considered. Washington, D.C.: John Bell Robinson, 1863. Reprint, Miami: Mnesmosyne Publishing Co., Inc., 1969.

Ruffin, Edmund. Anticipations o f the Future, to Serve as Lessons for the Present Time: in the Form o f Extracts o f Letters From an English Resident in the United States, to the London Times, From 1864 to 1870. Richmond: J.W. Randolph, 1860.

Sanders [Saunders], Prince. Haytian Papers. A Collection o f the Very Interesting Proclamations, and Other Official Documents; Together With Some Account o f the Rise, Progress, and Present State o f The Kingdom o f Hayti. London, 1816. Reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Negro University Press, 1969.

Sargent, Epes. Peculiar; a Tale o f the Great Transition. New York: Carleton, 1864.

Schade, Louis. A Book for the ‘Impending Crisis ’! Appeal to the Common Sense and Patriotism o f the People o f the United States. ‘Helperism ’ Annihilated! The ‘Irrepressible Conflict’’ and its Consequences! Washington, D.C.: Little, Morris, & Co., 1860.

Schoolcraft, Mrs. Henry Rose [Mary Howard], Plantation Life: The Narratives o f Mrs. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1860.

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Schoelcher, Victor. Histoire de I ’Esclavage Pendant les Deux Dernieres Annees. 2 Vols. Paris: Pagnerre, 1847.

Simmons, William J. Men o f Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising. Cleveland: G. M. Rewell, 1887.

Slocum, William N. The War, and How to End It. San Francisco: 1861.

Sorrel, Gilbert Moxley.Recollections o f a Confederate Staff Officer. Edited by Bell Irvin Wiley. New York and Washington: Neale Publishing Company, 1905. Reprint, Jackson, Tennessee: McCowat-Mercer Press, 1958.

Stephen, George E. A Voice o f Thunder: The Civil War Letters o f George E. Stephens. Edited by Donald Yacovone. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1851.

Straker, David Augustus. Reflections on the Life and Times o f Toussaint L ’Ouverture, the Negro Haytien, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Ruler Under the Dominion o f France, and Author o f the Independence o f Hayti. Columbia, South Carolina: Charles A. Calvo, Jr., 1886.

Sumner, Charles. Memoir and Letters o f Charles Sumner. Edited by Edward L. Pierce. 4 Vols. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893.

______. The Question o f Caste. Boston: Wright & Potter, 1869.

______. Issues at the Presidential Election: Speech o f Hon. Charles Sumner, at the City Hall, Cambridge, October 30, 1868. Boston: Wright & Potter, 1868.

______. The Equal Rights o f All; the Great Guarantee and Present Necessity, for the Sake o f Security, and to Maintain a Republican Government. Speech o f Hon. Charles Sumner, o f Massachusetts, in the United States Senate, February 6 and 1 , 1866. Washington: Printed at the Congressional Globe Office, 1866.

______. The National Security and the National Faith. Guaranties for the National Freedman and the National Creditor. Speech o f Charles Sumner, at the Republican State Convention, in Worcester, September 14, 1865. Boston: Press of George C. Rand & Avery, 1865.

______. Emancipation! Its Policy and Necessity as a War Measure for the Suppression of the Rebellion. Boston: 1862.

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Thompson, Matilda, G. Aunt Judy’s Story: A Tale From Real Life. Written for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Fair. Philadelphia: Merrihew & Thompson, Printers, 1855.

Thrasher, John B. Slavery A Divine Institution. By. J.B. Thrasher, o f Port Gibson. A Speech, Made Before the Breckinridge and Lane Club, November 5th, 1860. Port Gibson, Mississippi: Southern Reveille Book and Job Office, 1861.

Tourgee, Albion W. A Fool’s Errand. Edited by John Hope Franklin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.

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Nudelman, Franny. John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, & the Culture o f War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Oates, Stephen B. The Fires o f Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

______. With Malice Towards None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.

______. To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography o f John Brown. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Ochs, Stephen J. A Black Patriot and a White Priest: Andre Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

O’Leary, Cecilia Elizabeth.To Die For: the Paradox o f American Patriotism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Colonies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Ott, Thomas O. The Haitian Revolution 1789-1804. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973.

Pachonski, Jan, and Reuel K. Wilson. Poland’s Caribbean Tragedy: a Study o f Polish Legions in the Haitian War o f Independence, 1802-1803. Boulder, Colorado: East European Monographs, 1986.

Painter, Nell Irving. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.

Paludan, Phillip Shaw. A People’s Contest: The Union & Civil War, 1861-1865, 2d ed. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1996.

Paquette, Robert L. Sugar is Made With Blood: The Conspiracy o f La Escalara and the Conflict Between Empires over Slavery in Cuba. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

______and Stanley Engerman, eds. The Lesser Antilles in the Age o f European Expansion. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1996.

Parish, Peter J., and Susan-Mary Grant, eds. Legacy o f Disunion: the Enduring Significance o f the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003.

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Pease, Jane H., and Pease, William H. They Who Would Be Free: Blacks ’ Search for Freedom, 1830-186L Concord, New Hampshire: New Hampshire Composition, 1974.

Perkins, Howard Cecil, ed. Northern Editorials on Secession. 2 Vols. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1964.

Perry, Lewis. Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government o f God in Antislavery Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Peterson, Merrill D. John Brown: the Legend Revisited. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.

Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. American Negro Slavery: A Survey o f the Supply, Employment and Control o f Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

Ploski, Harry A., and James Williams, eds., The Negro Almanac (Detroit: Gale Research, Inc, 1989.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1976.

______. The South and the Sectional Conflict. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

Purcell, Sarah J. Sealed With Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the Civil War. Boston: Little, Brown, 1953. Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press Inc., 1989.

______. Black Abolitionists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Rael, Patrick. Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Raboteau, Albert.Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution ” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Randall, James Garfield. The Civil War and Reconstruction. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1937.

Reis, Joao Jose Reis. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising o f1835 in Bahia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

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Reardon, Carol. Pickett’s Charge in History & Memory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Reiss, Benjamin. The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Renehand, Jr., Edward J. The Secret Six: The True Tale o f the Men Who Conspired With John Brown. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1995.

Rice, Alan J., and Martin Crawford. Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass & Transatlantic Reform. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1999.

Richardson, David, ed. Abolition and its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790-1916. London: Frank Cass and Company, 1985.

Ripley, C. Peter. Witness for Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Roland, Charles P. An American Iliad: The Story o f the Civil War, 2d ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.

Rollin, Frank A. Life and Public Services o f Martin Delany: Sub-Assistant Commissioner Bureau o f Refugees, Freedmen, and o f Abandoned Lands, and Late Major 104th United States Colored Troops. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1883. Reprint, New York: Amo Press, 1969.

Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Rosen, Robert N. The Jewish Confederates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.

Rossbach, Jeffery.Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, The Secret Six, and a Theory o f Slave Violence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

Rotundo, Anthony E. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Royster, Charles. The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Sale, Maggie Montesinos. The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production o f Rebellious Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Sandburg, Carl. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years, One Volume Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954.

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Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall o f the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Verso, 2003.

Schouler, James. History o f the United States o f America, Under the Constitution. 7 Vols. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1894-1913.

Scott, Otto J. The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement. New York: Times Books, 1979.

Sedgwick, Ellery. The Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1909. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Shafer, Byron E., and Anthony J. Badger. Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775-2000. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2001.

Sidbury, James.Ploughshares Into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730-1810. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Smith, Anthony D., ed. Ethnicity and Nationalism. New York: E. J. Brill, 1992.

______. National Identity. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1991.

Smith, John David, ed. Anti-Abolition Tracts and Anti-Black Stereotypes: General Statements o f “The Negro Problem. ” New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993.

Smith, Adam I.P., and Grant, Susan-Mary. The North and the Nation in the Era o f the Civil War. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.

Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.

Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts o f Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation o f Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Stem, Madeleine B. Imprints on History: Book Publishers and American Frontiers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956.

Stewart, James Brewer. Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, Revised ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.

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Stoddard, T. Lothrop. The French Revolution in San Domingo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914.

Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations o f Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

______. The Ideological Origins o f Black Nationalism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.

Susman, Warren. Culture as History: the Transformation o f American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.

Takaki, Ronald, ed. Violence in the Black Imagination. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972.

Tansill, Charles C. National Identity. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1991.

Tebbel, John Williams.A History o f Book Publishing in the United States. The Creation o f an Industry 1630-1865. Vol. 1. New York & London: R. R. Bowker, 1972.

Thomas, Emory M. Robert E. Lee: A Biography. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995.

______. The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making o f the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Traver, Len. Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites o f Nationalism in the Early Republic. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

Trelease, Allen W. White Terror: the Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production o f History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Trudeau, Noah Andre. Like Men o f War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862-1865. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998.

Tyson, Jr., George F, ed. Toussaint L ’Ouverture. Englewood Cliff, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1973.

Villard, Oswald Garrison. John Brown 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910. Reprint, Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1966.

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Viotti da Costa, Emilia. Crowns o f Glory, Tears o f Blood: The Demerera Slave Rebellion o f1823. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Voelz, Peter M. Studies in African American History and Culture. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993.

Wade, Richard C. Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Wakelyn, Jon L. Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Waldstreicher, David. Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.

______. In The Midst o f Perpetual Fetes: The Making o f American Nationalism, 1776- 1820. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Walters, Ronald G. The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Walvin, James, ed. Slavery and British Society, 1776-1846. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Warner, Michael. The Letters o f the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Waxman, Percy. The Black Napoleon: The Story ofToussaintLouverture. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1931.

White, Deborah Gray. Ar ’n’t l a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985.

Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature o f the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Winship, Michael. Ticknor and Fields: The Business o f Literary Publishing in the United States o f the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Wilson, Joseph T. Black Phalanx. African American Soldiers in the War of Independence, the War o f 1812, and the Civil War. Hartford, Connecticut: Winter, 1888. Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1994.

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Wood, Forrest G. Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. The Shaping o f Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

______. Honor and Violence in the Old South. New York: Oxford, 1986.

______. The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.

Zboray, Ronald J.A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Zuckerman, Michael. Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Articles

Bailyn, Bernard. “The Idea of Atlantic History.”Itinerario 1 (1996): 19-44.

Belasco, Susan. “Harriet Martineau’s Black Hero and the American Antislavery Movement.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 55, no. 2 (2000): 157-94.

Bennett, Scott. “The Editorial Character and Readership of The Penny Magazine: An Analysis.” Victorian Periodical Review, 17 (1984): 127-41.

Berlin, Ira. “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African- American Society in Mainland North America.” The William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 2 (April 1996): 251-88.

______. “After Nat Turner: A Letter From the North.” Journal o f Negro History 55, no. 2 (April 1970): 144-51.

Bethel, Elizabeth Rauh. “Images of Hayti: The Construction of an Afro-American Lieu De Memoire.” Callaloo 15 (Summer 1992): 827-41.

Blight, David W. “For Something Beyond the Battlefield: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War.” Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (March 1989): 1156-78.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 287

Boyd, Willis D. “James Redpath and American Negro Colonization of Haiti, 1860-62.” The Americas 12(1995): 169-82.

Bradley, Mark L. “The Monstrous Proposition: North Carolina and the Confederate Debate on Arming the Slaves.” North Carolina Historical Review 80, no. 2 (April 2003): 153-87.

Buck-Morss, Susan. “Hegel and Haiti.” Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer 2000): 821-65.

Carp, Benjamin L. “Nations of American Rebels: Understanding Nationalism in Revolutionary North America and the Civil War South.” Civil War History 48, no. 1 (2002): 5-33.

Conlin, Michael F. “The Smithsonian Abolition Lecture Controversy: The Clash of Antislavery Politics With American Science in Wartime Washington.” Civil War History 46, no. 4 (2000): 301-23.

Craven, Avery. “Coming of the War Between the States, an Interpretation.” Journal o f Southern History 2, no. 3 (August 1936): 303-322.

Dain, Bruce. “Haiti and Egypt in Early Black Racial Discourse in the United States.” Slavery and Abolition 14, no. 3 (December 1993): 139-61.

Davis, David Brion. “Looking and Slavery From Broader Perspectives.” The American Historical Review 105, no. 2 (2000): 452-466.

. “American Equality and Foreign Revolutions.” Journal o f American History 76, no. 3 (December 1989): 729-52.

Demos, John. “The Antislavery Movement and the Problem of Violent Means.” New England Quarterly 37 (December 1864): 501-26.

Dillon, Merton. “The Abolitionists: A Decade of Historiography, 1959-1969.” Journal o f Southern History 35, no. 4 (1969): 500-22.

Fahs, Alice. “The Market Value of Memory: Popular War Histories and the Northern Literary Marketplace, 1861-186%T Book History l,no. 1 (1998): 107-39.

Foner, Philip S. “John Brown Russworm, a Document,” Journal o f Negro History 54, no. 4 (October 1969): 393-95.

Fordham, Monroe. “Nineteenth-Century Black Thought in the United States: Some Influences of the Santo Domingo Revolution.” Journal o f Black Studies 6, no. 2 (December): 115-126.

Games, Alison. “Teaching Atlantic History.” Itinerario no. 23 (1999): 162-173.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 288

Geggus, David. “The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions.” William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 2 (April 1987): 274-299.

Gilreath, James. “American Book Distribution,” Proceedings o f the American Antiquarian Society 95, no. 2 (October 1985): 501-83.

Grow, Matthew J. “The Shadow of the Civil War: A Historiography of Civil War Memory.”American Nineteenth Century History 4, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 77-103.

Harris, Jr., Robert L. “H. Ford Douglas: Afro-American Antislavery Emigrationist.” Journal o f Negro History 62, no. 3 (July 1977): 217-34.

Hartridge, Walther Charlton. “The Refugees From the Island of St. Domingo in Maryland.”Maryland Historical Magazine 38, no. 2 (June 1943): 103-22.

Hickey, Donald R. “America’s Response to the Slave Revolt in Haiti, 1791-1806.” Journal o f the Early Republic 2, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 361-79.

Hutton, Patrick. “The Role of Memory in the Historiography of the French Revolution.” History and Theory 30, no. 1 (February 1991): 56-69.

Johnson, Michael P. “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators.” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2001): 915-76.

Kaplan, Cora. “Black Heroes/White Writers: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Literary Imagination.” History Workshop Journal 46 (1998): 33-62.

King, Stewart. “Toussaint L’Ouverture Before 1791: Free Planter and Slave-holder.” Journal o f Haitian Studies 3, no. 4 (1997-98): 66-71.

Knight, Franklin. “The Haitian Revolution.” The American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (February 2000): 103-115.

LaChance, Paul. “The Politics of Fear: French Louisiana and the Slave Trade, 1786- 1809.” Plantation Society in theAmericas 1, no. 2 (1979): 162-97.

Lapsansky, Phillip. “Afro-Americana.” The Annual Report o f the Library Company o f Philadelphia (1989): 23-31.

Levi, Darrell E. “C.L.R. James: A Radical West Indian Vision of American Studies.” American Quarterly 43, no. 3 (September 1991): 486-501.

Linenthal, Edward T. “Struggling With History and Memory.” Journal o f American History 82, no. 3 (December 1995): 1094-1101.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 289

Matthewson, Tim. “Napoleon’s Haitian Guerilla War.” Military History 18, no. 6 (February 2002): 30-36.

______. “Thomas Jefferson and Haiti.” The Journal of Southern History 61, no. 2 (May 1995): 209-248.

______. “Abraham Bishop, ‘The Rights of Black Men,’ and the American Reaction to the Haitian Revolution.” Journal o f Negro History 61, no. 2 (1982): 148-54.

McKivigan, John R. “James Redpath, John Brown, and Abolitionist Advocacy of Slave Insurrection.” Civil War History 37, no. 4 (1991): 293-313.

______. “James Redpath and Black Reaction to the Haitian Emigration Bureau.” Mid- America 69 (1987): 139-53.

Nash, Gary B. “Reverberations of Haiti in the American North: Black Saint Dominguans in Philadelphia.” Pennsylvania History 65 (Supplement 1998): 44-73.

Pease William H., and Jane H. Pease, “Confrontation and Abolition in the 1850s,” Journal o f American History 58, no. 4 (March 1972): 923-37.

Pessen, Edward. “How Different From Each Other Where the Antebellum North and South?” American Historical Review 85, 5 (December 1980): 1119-49.

Phillips, Glenn O. “Maryland and the Caribbean, 1634-1984: Some Highlights.” Maryland Historical Magazine 83, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 199-214.

Popkin, Jeremy D. “Facing Racial Revolution: Captivity Narratives and Identity in the Saint-Domingue Insurrection.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 4 (2003): 511- 33.

Potter, David M. “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa.” American Historical Review 67, no. 4 (July 1962): 924-50.

Ransom, Roger. “Fact and Counterfact: The Second American Revolution Revisited.” Civil War History 45, no. 1 (1099): 28-60.

Restall, Matthew. “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America.” The Americas 57, no. 2 (October 2000): 171-205.

Sandage, Scott A. “A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939-1963.” Journal o f American History 80, no. 1 (June 1993): 135-167.

Seraile, William. “Afro-American Emigration to Haiti During the American Civil War.” The Americas 35 (1978): 185-2000.

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Shapiro, Herbert. “The Impact of the Aptheker Thesis: A Retrospective View of American Negro Slave Revolts.” Science & Society 48, no. 1 (1984): 52-73.

Sidbury, James. “Saint Domingue in Virginia: Ideology, Local Meanings, and Resistance to Slavery, 1790-1800.” The Journal o f Southern History LXVIII (August): 531- 552.

Thelan, David. “Memory and American History.” Journal o f American History 75, no. 4 (March 1989): 1117-29.

Thornell, Paul N.D. “The Absent Ones and the Providers: A Biography of the Vashons.” Journal o f Negro History 83, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 284-301.

Treudley, Mary. “The United States and Santo Domingo, 1789-1866.” Journal of Race Development VII (July and October 1916): 83-274.

Thornton, John. “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion.” American Historical Review 6, no. 4 (1993): 1101-1113.

______. “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution.” Journal o f Caribbean History [Barbados] 25, no.’s 1-2 (1991): 58-80.

Wade, Richard C. .’’The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration.” Journal o f Southern History 30, no. 2 (May 1964): 143-161.

Walters, Ronald G. “The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism.” American Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1973): 177-201.

Woodbery, Goerge Edward. Wendell Phillips: The Faith o f an American. Woodberry Society, 1912.

Dissertations

Bowers, Detine Lee. “A Strange Speech of an Estranged People: Theory and Practice of Antebellum African-American Freedom Day Orations.” Ph.D. diss., Purdue University, 1992.

Gustafson, Sandra Marie. “Performing the Word: American Oratory, 1630-1860.” Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1993.

Hinshaw, George Asher. “A Rhetorical Analysis of the Speeches of Frederick Douglass During and After the Civil War.” Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1972.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 291

Jackson, James O. “Origins of Pan-African Nationalism: Afro-American and Haytian Relations, 1800-63.” Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1976.

Purcell, Sarah J. “Sealed With Blood: National Identity and Public Memory of the Revolutionary War, 1775-1825.” Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1997.

Scott, III, Julius Sherrod, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution.” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986.

Small, Jr., Curtis. “ ‘Cet homme est une nation’: The Leader and the Collectivity in Literary Representations of the Haitian Revolution.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2001.

White, Ashli. ‘A Flood of Impure Lava’: Saint Domingue Refugees in the United States, 1791-1820.” Ph.D. diss., Colombia University, 2003.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.