Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura (review)

In this splendid edition, Michael Drexler republishes two strange and important narratives by the Philadelphia-based author Leonora Sansay. The first, Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo, recounts the experiences of two young American sisters caught in the turmoil of revolutionary Saint Domingue, where they have gone to live with the eldest sister’s French creole husband. The second, Laura, concerns the secret marriage of a beautiful young orphan to a gallant medical student, who dies in a duel to defend his wife’s honor. With its meticulous editing, clear and insightful introduction, and invaluable appendices, this new edition will go a long way toward placing these texts in the prominent light they deserve.

Indeed, while both narratives deserve far more scholarly attention than they yet have received, the relative neglect of Secret History, in particular, in the two centuries since its publication, is as worthy of remark as the text itself. Considered solely for its subject matter, this should already have become an indispensable text for historians and literary scholars alike. Based on Sansay’s first-hand observation of the Haitian Revolution in its turbulent final phase, Secret History provides a sustained and nuanced literary representation of the sole successful slave rebellion in the colonial Americas. While the specters of race slavery and warfare stalk the edges of a number of early American novels, from Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond and Arthur Mervyn to Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, they inhabit the vivid center of Sansay’s narrative. If its subject matter was not in itself a sufficient source of interest, both in its own day and in ours, the notoriety of its main addressee might have made it a sensation, for this epistolary narrative is addressed to the author’s reputed lover Aaron Burr—dueler, libertine, seditious conspirator, and, by the time the novel was published, vortex of early national fantasy and fear.

As Drexler’s introduction makes plain, however, these are only the most obvious of the narrative’s rewards. Secret History is also a fascinating formal creation. It moves fluently between genres as varied as travelogue, epistolary narrative, sentimental and gothic novel, and political reportage, and it shifts with disconcerting ease between a decadent domestic realm of balls and erotic intrigues in a besieged Cap Français and the violent warfare of revolution itself. As Colin Dayan first observed, one of the signal achievements of the narrative is to make visible the tight interconnectedness within a Caribbean slave society between social and sexual rivalry in the so-called domestic sphere and the more visible and public conflict for military and political control (Haiti, History, and the Gods, Berkeley, CA, 1995). Building on Dayan’s pioneering interpretation, Drexler establishes the key terms and concepts for future scholarly inquiry. Implicit in Sansay’s narrative, he contends, is a view of (slave) revolution as fluid and dynamic processes that take place in the circuit between bedchamber, ballroom, and battlefield. He goes on to argue that the complex itinerary of the narrative—which pursues its female protagonists from Philadelphia to Saint Domingue, Cuba, and Jamaica and back to Philadelphia—must be integral to any reading. As remarkable as Sansay’s insights on revolution as social process within Saint Domingue, he suggests, is her account of how revolution reverberates and circulates throughout the hemisphere and the wider Atlantic world. In keeping with Sansay’s emphasis on mobility and connection, Drexler also encourages us to read outward from this seemingly singular narrative to American literature and culture more broadly, to appreciate the central position of Atlantic slavery, Caribbean commerce, gender relations, and racial revolution within a range of contemporaneous writings.

Students at a variety of levels will learn much from this edition. I have taught the edition with good success to classes of advanced undergraduates and graduate students. A clear and cogent introduction makes the book a particular pleasure to teach to the former group...