Encountering Revolution

Ashli White. Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Ashli White extends the notion of Atlantic History to the Haitian Revolution--but while that perspective (rightly) puts that event into the larger context of the French and American Revolutions, White has a narrower focus--the effect that refugees from the ongoing Haitian conflict had on the new American republic.

The United States received thousands of refugees from Haiti during a period extending, intermittently, over nearly two decades. They consisted of three main groups: whites, free men of color, and enslaved blacks. Although Haiti was a plantation economy, the slaves who came were overwhelmingly the personal servants of the white refugees, or were skilled tradesmen. The exiles collectively challenged Americans nascent sense of nationhood--as a Republic (the exiles were often refugees from the pro-Republican island regime earlier in the conflict), and as a slave-holding Republic.

White traces this rather tightly-circumscribed story well. The presence of Haitian exiles posed an existential challenge to Americans' understanding of themselves--for white Americans, the plight of the white exiles created a tension between the American commitment to trans-national Republicanism, and a race-based slavery system. For black Americans, the Haitian Revolution provided a tangible example of how the language of liberty and revolution was universal.

Ultimately, white America chose race over universal Republicanism. The experience of accepting and assimilating the Haitian refugees resonated for decades, and profoundly influenced the development of early American nationalism.