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  • Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution
  • Edward Bartlett Rugemer (bio)
Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution. By Matthew J. Clavin. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. 241. Cloth, $39.95.)

It has been argued that Atlantic history has matured; it has also been claimed that the Atlantic approach loses relevance after 1800 or 1825. The monograph under review demonstrates the validity of the first statement while reminding us that we still have much to learn from Atlantic history. Matthew Clavin's book also shows that Atlantic history well into the nineteenth century, perhaps later, must continue to be examined. Clavin has uncovered overwhelming amounts of evidence that from 1859 through 1863 Americans of every section and complexion were powerfully moved by the histories of the Haitian Revolution that had been told and retold over the previous sixty years. [End Page 270]

The opening chapter quickly reviews the oppositional histories of the Haitian Revolution that were so important to the shaping of American public opinion on the issue of black emancipation. On the one hand, antislavery authors crafted a "heroic narrative" that celebrated the bravery of Haitian leaders such as Toussaint-Louverture and the Haitians who fought under his command to liberate themselves from slavery through military force. On the other hand, the Jamaican slaveholder Bryan Edwards told the story of the "horrors of St. Domingo" so well that it would be repeated into the early days of Reconstruction. Edwards concocted awful images of impaled white babies, slaveholders sawed in half by their slaves, and white women ravished, to illustrate the horrendous outcome of black emancipation through force of arms. References to the horrors of St. Domingo were pervasive in antebellum America, and Clavin rightly emphasizes the "subversive" quality of the heroic narrative. It tapped into the American celebration of redemptive violence but placed black men in the role of those redeemed, which undermined the dominant ideologies of white supremacy and proslavery.

Clavin could have spent more time with the development of these histories over time, and the book might have benefited, but his argument has a very specific chronology; he contends that American memories of the Haitian Revolution were especially important in fostering developments between 1859 and 1865, from John Brown's raid to the end of the war. For this entire period, sectional partisans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line trumpeted the history of the Haitian Revolution to bolster their arguments. Fire-eaters gave terrifying speeches on the horrors of St. Domingo, and abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips delivered stirring lectures to audiences that grew as secession came and emancipation approached. In 1862 William Whiting argued in War Powers of the President that the decision of Commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax in 1794 to abolish slavery in Saint-Domingue should serve as a precedent for President Abraham Lincoln. Just as Sonthonax abolished slavery as a war measure to bolster French forces in the war with Great Britain, so could Lincoln abolish slavery to aid the Union effort against the Confederacy. Lincoln read Whiting and appointed him solicitor of the War Department, and although the Caribbean precedent was only one aspect of Whiting's argument, its influence is nonetheless apparent.

I would like to pose only one significant critique to this important monograph. Clavin challenges several prominent historians who have argued that with respect to the abolition of slavery in other regions of the Americas, the Haitian Revolution actually had counterrevolutionary effects in that it provoked slaveholders to take measures that prolonged [End Page 271] slavery. Clavin argues that his focus on the Civil War era of the United States undermines this claim, but I am not so sure. Slavery expanded enormously in the decades after the Haitian Revolution in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil in what Dale Tomich has called the "second slavery." Expanding Atlantic markets for staples produced by slaves provided the economic impetus for the expansion of slavery, and in the nascent struggle between slaveholders and abolitionists in Great Britain and the United States, the Haitian Revolution clearly tipped the...

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