The characterization of “Black” government as existentially threatening has a long history in the United States. Slaveholders first developed the trope in the 1790s in their representations of the emergent nation of Haiti, framing it as a dangerous site of social experimentation and savagery where Black freedom would inexorably lead to white death. This depiction was reductive, and purposeful. Haiti’s “horrors” served as a rallying cry and a cautionary tale; they justified a certain understanding of the nature (and future) of racial pluralism in the United States. Today, spurious depictions of South Africa as an anti-white hellscape swim in the same waters. The treatment of refugees, then and now, brings this similarity into high relief.
Haitian independence was declared on January 1, 1804. Before that, Haiti was known world-wide as Saint Domingue, a French colony on the western third of Hispaniola that generated tremendous wealth on the backs of enslaved Africans.
The series of events that history deems “the Haitian Revolution” spanned the prior 14 years and encompassed a staggering array of changes. Americans were intimately aware of those events. Over the period, “St. Domingo” was depicted as a beleaguered colony, a site of fights over racial equality, a plantation economy unraveled by slave rebellion, a place where slavery was legally abolished, a diplomatic partner, and a player in European geopolitics.
After 1804, the country became the second independent nation in the Western hemisphere, one expressly defined around the absence of slavery and colonial control. All Haitians, regardless of their ethnicity, were constitutionally defined as “Black”; land was to be shared; runaway slaves were declared free the moment they touched its shores. In an age of revolutionary change, there was perhaps no more radical shift than this.
For most white Americans, and especially enslavers, the white colonists of Saint Domingue experiencing these changes were a focus of racial empathy. “When we recollect how nearly similar the situation of the Southern States and St. Domingo are in the profusion of Slaves,” South Carolina’s governor wrote to the colony’s General Assembly in September 1791, “we cannot but sensibly fear for your situation.” The thousands of white French colonists who fled Haiti and arrived in American communities after a particular moment of disruption in June 1793 were met with open arms, receiving support from private groups, state governments, and the U.S. Congress alike.