But then a couple of developments got me thinking.
First, a reader took me to task for ignoring the heroes of the Haitian revolution, especially Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave who beat Napoleon’s army, freed his people and put Haiti on the road to independence.
It wasn’t deliberate. He wasn’t part of the story I was hoping to tell, which was about the refugees that landed here and the paranoid reaction of then-president Jefferson. But he was, really, because he showed the world what Jefferson did not want to admit – that freed slaves could accomplish great things.
Then I heard a radio program that usually fascinates me, and last week held me enthralled. It’s “the Thomas Jefferson Hour” in which Jefferson scholar Clay Jenkinson takes on the third president’s persona, explaining his thoughts and actions. This time it was about his response to Haiti.
Stepping out of the persona at one point, Jenkinson said, “This is a hard program for me because it puts Mr. Jefferson in such a terrible, terrible light.”
Now back to Toussaint L’Ouverture, whose adopted name means “all souls awakening.” He had been a freed slave working for his former master as a carriage driver. After the French revolution of 1789, as the ideals of liberty and equality washed ashore in the Caribbean, the slaves who had been subjected to the most brutal conditions imaginable, revolted, and L’Ouverture took up their cause.
It’s complicated because the French initially backed the slaves against the planters, and L’Ouverture was their ally. He helped them defeat British and Spanish forces on the island. But when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power and sent troops to Haiti to quash the revolution and reestablish slavery, L’Ouverture, in a series of brilliant moves, defeated them.
He was known as the liberator of his people, a sort of black George Washington. After he was captured and perished in a French prison, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, his principal lieutenant, finished the job of liberating Haiti and declared its independence in 1804.
That’s when Jefferson lost it.
Arguably the greatest idealist in American history, the man who emblazoned our basic document with the words “all men are created equal,” Jefferson could not bring himself to include men or women of color in that equation. He was convinced that word of a successful slave uprising would prompt slaves in Virginia and elsewhere to revolt and if we didn’t help stop them, we’d be “murderers of our own children.”
Even though Jefferson philosophically deplored slavery, he was at heart a racist, unable to accept the notion that blacks could govern themselves, Jenkinson feels. And he was an opportunist.
He came to realize that Napoleon’s forces had become bogged down in a Vietnam-like quagmire in Haiti, that it was costing him blood and treasure and his hopes of empire in the New World. In effect, Jefferson offered to help put down the slave uprising if Napoleon would sell him New Orleans. What he got instead was all of Louisiana – then consisting of all or most of 14 states.
Thanks to the slaves in Haiti, America was able to double in size.
Jefferson’s aid to Napoleon amounted to no more than helping resupply his warships and that didn’t really do any good. The deplorable thing, though, was that after Haiti declared its independence, he cut off trade to the vulnerable new republic. That policy helped doom the Haitian economy. As Jenkinson said, “We are not immune for what has happened there.”
Illustration: Toussaint L’Ouverture. National Maritime Museum, London
