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Epilogue
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EPILOGUE Although the Caribbean has played an important role in the cultural development of the United States, it does not resonate in the American mind as an area worthy of much attention. Some historians and anthropologists have studied the region, but Americans are generally not aware that the southern United States shared its history and many institutions with the Creole societies in the colonies of Great Britain, France, Spain, and Holland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cultural attitudes, agricultural systems, labor sources, laws, architecture, and vernacular waysof life all developed in a shared diffusion of culture in the Caribbean basin, of which the southern United States was the northernmost extremity. The events in eighteenth-century St. Domingue and the subsequent history of Haiti were only one example of the interaction between the United States and the Caribbean. Yet contemporary observers of antebellum America were far more aware of the Caribbean influences in the American South than are present-day observers of American society. They naturally linked the destinies of the Americas in ways that we have forgotten because history seemed to them amatter ofgive-and-take, not simply a one-way phenomenon. The inability to perceive this cultural exchange is probably the result of the ethnocentrism and racism that developed in the the United States during the nineteenth century. The rediscovery of the Caribbean as a place for leisure pursuits, exotic foods, and cheap labor in the mid-twentieth century has only exacerbated the problem and widened the gap between American perception and historical reality. The Caribbean has continued to influence the United States, in areas quite different from those that were significant in the nineteenth century, though American attitudes were formed in the period this study covers. The southern view of the Haitian experiment has been incorporated into the national psyche, just as Americans accepted southern and national attempts to exert control over blacks. Eric Foner has shown that control over laborwas a major concern in all 189 190 HAITI'S INFLUENCE ON ANTEBELLUM AMERICA slave societies in the Caribbeanand in Africa.1 It is, significantly, one extension of the "lessons of St. Domingue and Haiti" that blacks must not be allowed free will. The notions of black vengeance and black laziness came from different sources; however, St. Domingue and Haiti gave whites their most unforgettable and most often evoked image—that of Melville's "slumbering volcano ." Like those Italians who live in the shadow of Vesuvius (there have been two major eruptions in two thousand years), southerners becamevulcanized about the issue ofslavery because of one major eruption. It is possible to write about antebellum culture without mentioning St. Domingue, and many have. In fact, we accept the importance of the cotton gin to southern society without requiring evidence that southerners themselves talked about it very often. Yet one of the most striking aspects of southern history wasthe frequency with which southerners—and their critics—evoked the history of St. Domingue and Haiti. No issue having to do with slaveryand the role ofblacks in American society was discussed at so many different times, in so manydifferent ways, for so many different reasons as the lessons of the Haitian Revolution.A few speeches here, severalletters and diary entries there, a pamphlet in another place, or from another time—these fragments indicate that the events in St. Domingue made an indelible impression upon those concerned with black history in antebellum America. Furthermore, everyone who used those lessons knewthat audiences werealso awareofthese events. Rarely can one find any events being evoked in heated debate some sixty years—three generations—later. The actual historyof the Haitian Revolution did not have to be mentioned by name, though it often was. The conclusions that whites and blacksdrew were widespread in antebellum America and carried into the twentieth century; after abolition, however, there was little need to refer to the specific history of slavery in St. Domingue. i. Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge, 1983). Other sources that put St. Domingue and Haiti into context are: Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550-1*12 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 375-403; Eugene D. Genovese,From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge, 1979), esp. 81-99; John Bauer, "International Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution," Americas,XXVI (April, 1970], 394-418; and George M.Fredrickson , The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-Amencan Character and...