The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas by Sara E. Johnson (review)

With this book, Sara E. Johnson adds to our understanding of the constraints and opportunities available to people of color in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries following the Haitian Revolution. Her work complements that of a growing cohort of historians and writers, including Julius Scott, Jeff Bolster, Rebecca Scott, Jean Hebrard, and Jane Landers, who illustrate how the Haitian Revolution and early independence affected individual lives. Emphasis on the cultural life of the individual makes Johnson’s work especially welcome. She provides rich context for these lives, examining layers of local and international influences. Her analysis reveals complex communities that were not homogenous—as they appear in the telling of many American observers of the Caribbean—but pierced by class, color, and slave/free divisions. Placing her work in the field of interdisciplinary studies—the creole states of academia—she draws on an impressively multimedia trove of stories, images, music, and dance, to argue for the “transcolonial collaboration” among those of African descent in the world of the Afro-Caribbean.

In her first chapter, she looks at the use of dogs in Caribbean warfare and how this subject was perceived by eighteenth-century observers. This practice is well documented during the Haitain Revolution, but Johnson reveals how Europeans powers throughout the region used canine warfare at different times to subdue the colonial populations. She highlights in particular the British use of these animals in Jamaica during the Second Maroon War and demonstrates that the practice was not only more widely used than previously understood, it was almost commonplace.

Another neglected subject that Johnson raises is the occupation of the Dominican Republic by Haitians. Using snippets of information about Jose Campos Tavares, a former slave from the Dominican side of the island who fought in the Haitian Revolution and joined in the occupation of the Dominican by the Haitian army, Johnson reveals how he ascended through the Haitian military and transformed his social trajectory. Although this was not unusual for those many who fought and survived this thirteen-year war, Johnson’s analysis brings Campos Tavares’s decisions and choices and the stories of those who remained on the island during the early 1800s to life for the reader.

After the Dominican Republic, she then takes us to the Gulf coast activities of Joseph Savary, a former St. Domingue free person of color, and Jean Lafitte, the famous smuggler and slave trader. In this chapter, Johnson uncovers the role Savary played in helping Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans with a large contingent of black soldiers. Lafitte and his men, many of whom were black, spent much of their time smuggling slaves into the United States from the Caribbean. Johnson has mined secondary and primary sources for this information and has succeeded in filling in gaps in our understanding of what members of the St. Domingue diaspora did once they arrived in the United States.

She is particularly strong when she brings to a subject her textual and visual analysis. For example, her reading of the images of the Haitian Revolution that were printed and published throughout the Atlantic world remind us that widespread fear must have been felt by all in such a chaotic and violent time and place. She continues this visual analysis with her discussion of female clothing and costumes worn by dance groups called the French Set Girls. Examining the visual clues within these images, Johnson argues that the clothing depicted were political and cultural signifiers connecting the wearers to St. Domingue/Haiti. In addition, the women’s music and performances also bore coded messages, “asserting belonging to a place where the master class had been soundly defeated.” Johnson’s skill as an interpreter of cultural activities is most evident in this chapter.

Johnson’s chapter on the black press in the United States and the Caribbean examines how these various newspapers shared...