The Limits of Fear: The Saint Dominguan Challenge to Slave Trade Abolition in the United States

On January 1, 1808, a landmark federal law went into effect that banned the entry of foreign slaves into the United States. After decades of debate, piecemeal restrictive measures, and abolitionist agitation, Congress emerged in 1807 with, as Speaker Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina put it, "but one opinion" to end the foreign slave trade.¹ Yet less than two years later, Congress faced a direct challenge to its commitment to the act when thousands of white Saint Dominguan exiles from the Haitian Revolution sought to migrate to the United States with their slaves in tow. Expelled in 1809 from their initial place of refuge, Cuba, as a consequence of the Napoleonic Wars, the white refugees pressed for an exemption from the ban. Congress, in an almost unanimous vote, granted the request. As a result, over three thousand slaves entered Louisiana, and over three thousand free colored Saint Dominguans were admitted as well. Given the overwhelming consensus for the 1807 law, why did Congress set its convictions aside in this particular case?

On the face of it, the exemption for the refugees smacks of another instance of white American hypocrisy about abolition, and to a certain extent, it was. After all, part of the impetus behind the federal decision to end the foreign slave trade was the growing condemnation of the traffic in moral terms. Similar to their British contemporaries (who also instituted a ban in 1808), many Americans found the slave trade reprehensible, citing the kidnapping of Africans and the middle passage as evidence of its heinousness. Congress's quick acquiescence to the white exiles in 1809 seems to offer more proof that the much-touted legislation was nothing but pretense. As W. E. B. Dubois first pointed out in 1896, American laxity in suppressing the slave trade reduced the moral principles underpinning the law to mere rhetoric.²

But the inconsistency between words and action is perhaps more useful for rethinking the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the United States. Of course, 1809 was not Americans' first experience in coping with the aftershocks of events on Saint Domingue. Nor was it their first encounter with the revolution's refugees. When the French colony erupted in violence in 1791, inhabitants fled by the thousands and continued to do so over the next thirteen years. Many Saint Dominguans found asylum in other Caribbean islands, while some tried their luck in Europe. At least ten thousand exiles—black, white, and free people of color—migrated to the United States in the 1790s, disembarking everywhere from New York to Charleston. On arrival, the refugees elicited both sympathy and controversy. White Americans saw their Saint Dominguan counterparts as unfortunate victims who had lost everything at the hands of marauding slaves. At the same time, Americans questioned the white refugees' political allegiances, and as they brought their slaves into the United States, residents worried about the possible spread of rebellion to their own shores.³

This latter issue—the fear of slave rebellion—was seen as another reason to end the slave trade. In the wake of the Haitian Revolution, many American observers viewed slave importation as a threat to national and social self-preservation. The argument was twofold. Opponents of the slave trade emphasized that the more slaves introduced into a nation, the more prone that country was to attack from within. European powers could infect slaves with notions about the rights of man and encourage them to rebel (which some contended had been the case in Saint Domingue). In addition, anti–slave trade advocates maintained that Caribbean slaves, especially those from Saint Domingue, would bring insurrection to the United States if permitted into the country.⁴

In light of the impulses behind the law, the case of the Saint Dominguans in 1809 should have been clear-cut. Comprised of at least three thousand slaves from the site of the most successful slave rebellion in history, this migration exemplified what the slave trade law was designed to stop. But the disparity between principles and practice resulted, in part...