29 - The Impact of the Haitian Revolution on the United States

Summary

This essay analyzes a central problem of both the U.S. and Haitian revolutions: namely, establishing governments based on enlightened principles, while maintaining economies dependent on Atlantic plantation regimes. The unique contours of this predicament in revolutionary Saint-Domingue had significant consequences for the United States. Like their North American peers, leaders in the French colony were committed to the production of plantation commodities. But in contrast to the United States, slavery was abolished, and citizenship granted to black men. During the 1790s, free and enslaved observers in North America tried to discern what each stage of the Haitian revolutionary experiment portended for the future of slavery, emancipation, black citizenship, and the economy in the United States. With independence in 1804, Haiti became a beacon for people of African descent, in part, because the new nation renounced the plantation regime, concluding that it was incompatible with universal freedom and citizenship. But most white North American rulers actively resisted this conclusion—and the Haitian example—for decades, until the paradox of a slaveholding republic reached its breaking point in the U.S. Civil War.