Haytian Revolution in the United States

Influence of the Haytian Revolution (Toussaint l’Ouverture and Anti-Slavery Effort, 1787–1808)

In the book “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870” (1), W. E. B. Du Bois explained the following: The rôle which the great Negro Toussaint, called L’Ouverture, played in the history of the United States has seldom been fully appreciated. Representing the age of revolution in America, he rose to leadership through a bloody terror, which contrived a Negro “problem” for the Western Hemisphere, intensified and defined the anti-slavery movement, became one of the causes, and probably the prime one, which led Napoleon to sell Louisiana for a song, and finally, through the interworking of all these effects, rendered more certain the final prohibition of the slave-trade by the United States in 1807.

From the time of the reorganization of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, in 1787, anti-slavery sentiment became active. New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia had strong organizations, and a national convention was held in 1794. The terrible upheaval in the West Indies, beginning in 1791, furnished this rising movement with an irresistible argument. A wave of horror and fear swept over the South, which even the powerful slave-traders of Georgia did not dare withstand; the Middle States saw their worst dreams realized, and the mercenary trade interests 75of the East lost control of the New England conscience.

Resources

Notes and References

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870” (1893), Longmans, Green and Co., London, New York, Bombay and Calcuta.

See Also

Further Reading

• Assiento, or, Contract for allowing to the Subjects of Great Britain the Liberty of Importing Negroes into the Spanish America. Sign’d by the Catholick King at Madrid, the Twenty sixth Day of March, 1713. By Her Majesties special Command. London, 1713.
• William Jay. Miscellaneous Writings on Slavery. Boston, 1853.
• Jonathan Edwards. The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade, and of the Slavery of the Africans, etc. [New Haven,] 1791.
• Remarks on the Colonization of the Western Coast of Africa, by the Free Negroes of the United States, etc. New York, 1850.
• Thomas Clarkson. The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament. 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1808.
• Frederic G. Mather. Slavery in the Colony and State of New York. (In Magazine of American History, XI. 408.)
• Carl Garcis. Das Heutige Völkerrecht und der Menschenhandel. Eine völkerrechtliche Abhandlung, zugleich Ausgabe des deutschen Textes der Verträge von 20. Dezember 1841 und 29. März 1879. Berlin, 1879.
• Drs. Tucker and Belknap. Queries respecting the Slavery and Emancipation of Negroes in Massachusetts, proposed by the Hon. Judge Tucker of Virginia, and answered by the Rev. Dr. Belknap. (In Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, First Series, IV. 191.)