Dangerous intelligence: Slavery, race, and St. Domingue in the early American Republic (Haiti)

This dissertation investigates the ways in which Americans in Philadelphia experienced and processed the events that eventually would be deemed a Haitian Revolution. It begins in the 1780s, with the intensification of Americans' commercial relationship with French St. Domingue after American independence, and ends in the mid-1790s, when domestic partisan divisions and Anglo-French war materially changed the ways in which people in the city would interact with events and ideas from the island. In the intervening period an array of factions vied with each other in the Caribbean colony. Their struggles were directed towards an equal number of conflicting goals. Throughout it all, Americans were transfixed.; These developments had massive commercial and political effects in the United States. Tidings from the island also fired African and European American imaginations. I trace the relationships observers described between events on St. Domingue and concurrent "revolutionary" happenings in France, Britain, and the United States. Following this lodestar, I map the incorporation of ideas about St. Domingue into American rhetoric and action with regard to slavery. In recovering the intensity of Americans' gaze towards the island, I show how the struggles of free coloreds for equality under French law beginning in 1790, the rising of the slaves after 1791, and the granting of immediate emancipation in 1793--4 contributed to a high-tide of American Revolutionary-era antislavery sentiment. I explore the texture of this ideological development, emphasizing its implications and extent as I reconcile the crescendo of American antislavery activity over these years with the equally fervid and pervasive fear of the insurrectionary slaves. I linger particularly on the reports of the initial insurrections, to demonstrate the elements therein that were underplayed and undeveloped amidst the images and ideas that endured.; In making sense of the news, Americans made St. Domingue a referent to a number of weighty tropes in contemporary political and racial contests. Americans made sense of developments there according to their own needs, goals, and interests. St. Domingue entered their vocabularies as a multivalent abstraction. I parse its meanings, telling as much about the observers as the observed.