Why We Are Partly Responsible for the Mess that is Haiti
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Then as now St. Domingue was divided into a French-speaking western third (the future republic of Haiti) and a Spanish-speaking eastern two thirds (the future Dominican Republic) with a range of mountains as a barrier between them. Spain had ceded the Spanish part of the island to France in 1795. The French section's sugar, coffee and indigo plantations made it France's most valuable overseas possession until the 1789 revolution triggered a civil war that wrecked the island's economy.
Out of the turmoil emerged an extraordinary black leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture, who ruled both enclaves, in which some 400,000 ex-slaves lived uneasily with thousands of whites and free mulattoes. Toussaint was immensely proud of his martial prowess and did not complain when his followers called him "the first of the blacks" and compared him to the great conquerors of history.
"Nothing would be easier than to supply everything for your army and navy, and to starve out Toussaint," Jefferson told Pichon. The president wanted to show his undying enthusiasm for the French Revolution, in spite of the way it had turned into an orgy of mob violence and then morphed into a military dictatorship under Napoleon Bonaparte. His focus on Toussaint suggests he was also motivated by a desire to remove a figure that gave the South's millions of black slaves dangerous dreams of glory. A few months earlier, Virginia had narrowly escaped an explosion of violence when a slave insurrection led by Gabriel and Martin Prosser had been detected at the last moment.
Before President Jefferson knew what was happening, Napoleon had a 15,000 man army heading for St. Domingue. Then came news from Paris that did not fit the founder of the Democratic Party's blithe assumption of perpetual affection between democratic America and revolutionary France. Secretly, Napoleon had persuaded Spain to return the immense territory of Louisiana to France. The French had given it to Spain to compensate its ally for losses elsewhere in the Seven Years (1754-61) war with England. The news also included a soon verified rumor that the French Army, after occupying St. Domingue and disposing of Toussaint, was going to head for New Orleans to assume control of Louisiana. All they needed were flatboats to ascend the Mississippi and create bayonet-bristling outposts in Natchez, St. Louis and other towns along the America's western border, where restless frontiersmen frequently cast aspersions on their rulers in distant Washington D.C.
At this point, the tough cool realism of Secretary of State James Madison took charge of the situation. He soon persuaded his close friend President Jefferson that when the French Army arrived in St. Domingue, it would NOT receive an iota of food or a dollar of American money. This decision played no small part in wrecking Napoleon's plans for a restored New World empire. Another large factor was the fierce resistance of St. Domingue's blacks, even after Toussaint was captured and shipped to France to die in an icy dungeon in the Jura Mountains. Also in the game was aedes egypti, the female mosquito that carries the yellow fever virus. Thanks to that small buzzing creature, the French army melted away to a forlorn remnant.
Out of this hugger mugger emerged an improbable triumph that made Jefferson a two term president and the icon of the Democratic Party: The Louisiana Purchase. A disgusted Napoleon sold the stupendous chunk of the trans-Mississippi west to the United States to raise money for a new war with England. In the peans of praise for this piece of marvelous luck, St. Domingue was more or less ignored by almost everyone in America.
But Jefferson was paying attention -- for the second of the two reasons that had motivated his original offer to Louis Andre Pichon. Out of the savage war between the French and the black ex-slaves had emerged a grim new leader, Jean Jacques Dessalines. He abandoned Toussaint's attempt to create a multi-racial society. Instead, Dessalines removed the white stripe from the French tricolor to create a new flag -- and chose the Carib Indian name Haiti for his country. His army marched through Haiti, ruthlessly slaughtering every white person still alive on the island. This brutal denoument sent a shudder of dread through the American South.
In 1804, after Jefferson's landslide reelection for a second term, the president's son in law, Congressmen John W. Eppes of Virginia, rose in Congress to declare that U.S. merchants should have nothing to do with people of a race Americans needed "to depress and keep down." Congress soon concurred and passed a law prohibiting all trade with Haiti, which Jefferson signed. This ukase guaranteed Haiti's isolation for most of the nineteenth century, during which it became the poverty-ridden coup-tormented mess it remains today.
One of the few who objected to the Eppes-Jefferson policy was Federalist Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts. This forerunner of the Republican Party, who hated Jeffersonian democracy so much he wanted New England to secede from the Union, attacked the trade ban, claiming that the Haitians were only guilty of having "a skin not colored like our own."
Now we hear that France, in the person of Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, a self styled admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte, is thinking of sending an expeditionary force to restore order in Haiti. One can only hope that the Republican administration in Washington can think of a better solution than allowing this American hating reactionary to meddle in the mess we and the French created two hundred years ago.
This article was first published by the New York Sun and is reprinted with permission of the author.