My apologies for my first Junto post being a bit of shameless self-promotion. But here it is: a piece I just wrote for The New York Times on Haiti’s role in the Civil War. In short, it’s about how a small but significant portion of black Americans saw Haiti as a better option than the United States during the conflict. As Matt Karp wrote on his Junto post today, the most groundbreaking Haiti-related scholarship today deals with what happened after the Haitian Revolution, that is, post-1804.
Ada Ferrer, for instance, recently wrote an excellent essay in the AHR on the decade after Haitian independence, which shows the black republic’s contribution to the intellectual debates in the 19th century Atlantic world. For the piece I wrote, a major help was Matthew Clavin’s recent book Toussaint L’Ouverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Penn, 2009), which demonstrates just how strong the image of Haiti was for blacks in America. Even if they didn’t choose to emigrate, they nonetheless continued to invoke the island as an exemplar of black dignity. Another noteworthy book now more than a decade old that also deals with Haiti’s impact on antebellum America is Chris Dixon’s African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Praeger, 2000).
I admit that, from an academic point of view, all the focus around Haiti can seem like a little much. But as much of the latest scholarship makes clear, there’s still much new ground to cover, especially in the post-independence years. What’s more, the faddishness of Haitian scholarship shouldn’t blind us to the fact that non-scholars still have a dim if not vacant understanding of Haiti’s role in America’s Revolutionary period. Though it may not seem so, Haiti’s place in history is far from settled.