Introduction The Ideas of Haiti and Black Internationalism Haiti would not exist had it been up to France, Great Britain, Spain, or the United States. Certainly not if George Washington had had his way. In September 1791, mere weeks after the Vodou ceremony that started the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue, the slaveholding U.S. president wrote to the French ambassador to the United States pledging to help restore France''s control over its richest colony. "I am happy in the opportunity of testifying how well disposed the United States are to render every aid . to quell the alarming insurrection of Negroes in Hispanola [ sic ]," he told his ally. Having just won his country''s independence from a colonial power, Washington wanted to see that black people in Saint-Domingue did not secure their own.

Of course, Haitians did just that. They did the unthinkable. In the United States, the so-called Founding Fathers, educated men of the Enlightenment with lofty ideals of representative government and natural rights, had no tools for understanding an actual revolution. Not one initiated by Africans said to lack history, will, and a love for freedom. Not one that overthrew colonialism and slavery in one fell swoop. So instead of celebrating the Haitian Revolution as the most radical declaration of human rights the world had ever known, they characterized it as a savage race war and an unjustifiable attack on (white) property rights. They tried to silence the Haitian Revolution--to speak out of existence the incomprehensible black nation that it birthed. Haiti, the first black nation and second independent republic in the Western Hemisphere thus became shorthand for a host of evils.

In the antebellum United States, Haiti became synonymous with slave insurrection and black barbarism. It came to mean the specter of abolitionism, and for that sin it was shunned. Explaining why the United States refused to grant diplomatic recognition to Haiti, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri proclaimed that "the peace of eleven states in this Union will not permit the fruits of a successful negro insurrection to be exhibited among them." White southerners, he continued, would "not permit black Consuls and Ambassadors to establish themselves in our cities, and to parade through our country, and give their fellow blacks in the United States, proof in hand of the honors which await them, for a like successful effort on their part." They could not acknowledge Haitian independence, at least not without entertaining dangerous questions about the "rights of Africans in this hemisphere." For men like Benton, to control U.S. foreign policy was to command the marketplace of ideas about slavery and freedom and about Haiti and the Haitian Revolution.

From their perspective, to cede ownership of policies or thought would ensure the realization of abolitionist nightmares. It would mean the collapse of a slaveholding empire already built on lands seized from Native Americans and Mexicans--the end of the world that slaveholders dreamed. Proslavery internationalists had reason for concern. As they knew and scholars have since shown, the concurrent, subversive idea of Haiti was a legitimate cause of worry for white men, women, and children invested in racial slavery. The symbolic power of a black nation-state birthed in a successful slave insurrection undermined the power of white planters and businessmen who reaped from black labor the greatest profits that the world had ever seen. In fact, it encouraged other visions of emancipation and emboldened champions of racial equality. News of the Haitian Revolution spread like wildfire among black people throughout the Americas. From its outset, free and enslaved black people monitored newspaper coverage of the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue and solicited reports of its progress by word of mouth.

Black sailors on U.S. trading vessels that conducted business in the French colony were more than happy to comply. As they confirmed that slavery was, in fact, under assault in the Caribbean, thousands of planters fleeing Saint-Domingue landed in New Orleans, Philadelphia, Norfolk, and Charleston. While they brought warnings of the so-called Horrors of Saint-Domingue, their enslaved people imported inspirational stories about the rebellious origins of Haiti meant to stimulate similar struggles for black liberation. As Booker T. Washington wrote, African Americans came to appreciate "the Haytian struggle for liberty." They knew of its example even if they were "ignorant of everything except [their] master and the plantation.

" In fact, they equated it with their most profound aspirations. For free and enslaved black people, Haiti became a singular beacon of liberty. Enslaved revolutionaries including Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner tried to emulate the Haitian Revolution, the lone successful slave rebellion in modern global history. Free black northerners fought for the diplomatic recognition of Haiti, the black nation that they understood to be the embodiment of racial equality. Thousands more accepted the invitations of the Haitian presidents Jean-Pierre Boyer and Fabre Geffrard and fled to Haiti''s shores. One black man who emigrated from Washington, D.C., to Port-au-Prince during the 1820s explained the reasons for that refugee movement in a letter sent to friends in his former home.

"I have adopted myself a Haytian; and I bid eternal farewell to America," he wrote. "Here I repose under my vine and banana tree, contented with Hayti . determined to live and die under the safe-guard of her constitution." In the minds of antebellum African Americans, Haiti was haven and inspiration. It was imitable, too. In the decades before the Civil War, militant black abolitionists including David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet proclaimed that the Haitian Revolution proved the righteousness and efficacy of slave rebellion. They welcomed what they called the Abolition War. During the conflict caused by secessionists who predicted that Abraham Lincoln''s election would bring about "San Domingo and Hayti, with all their attendant horrors," black recruiters and soldiers invoked and imitated Haitians.

As one chaplain in the Union Army observed, "The name of Toussaint L''Overture has been passed from mouth to mouth until it has become a secret household word." It had encouraged the hundreds of thousands of black soldiers and sailors who enlisted in the Union Army and Navy because they "felt it was right for the colored Haytiens to fight to be free [so] it is equally right for colored Americans." These "American Toussaints" ended U.S. slavery and put white supremacy on its heels. They did not secure uncontested freedom, though. How could they when their white counterparts still litigated what should have been the incontestable outcome of the Haitian Revolution? No, U.S.

black activists, intellectuals, soldiers, and enslaved people won the war but quickly found themselves embroiled in another fight. Like Haitians, they had to grapple with freedom''s varied and contested meanings in a world founded on racial slavery and white supremacy. The Black Republic begins with this premise: there existed multiple and sometimes conflicting ideas of Haiti that changed over time but remained critical to African Americans during the long postemancipation era following the U.S. Civil War. It is a premise that has received little to no consideration to date. For the most part, historians have drawn attention either to white fear of or black fascination with the Haitian Revolution during the eras of slavery and the Civil War. Their works have ended at the conclusion of the Civil War, when numerous black intellectuals identified new and urgent connections among Haiti, freedom, and black self-determination.

This forgotten period of black interest in Haiti overlaps with a significant gap in the scholarship on black internationalism. In recent decades, historians have paid closer attention to the global dimensions of local and national black freedom struggles, compared collective experiences across the African Diaspora, and examined how black organizations, intellectuals, and activists shaped international politics. They have advanced our understanding of black internationalism, an insurgent political and intellectual response to slavery, colonialism, and white imperialism. Still, studies of black internationalism tend to focus on three eras: the Age of Revolutions, at the end of the eighteenth century, when black internationalism emerged as an evangelical and revolutionary struggle for universal emancipation; World War I, when black leftists and nationalists gave black internationalism greater organizational structure and increased geographic scope; and what the scholars Michael O. West and William G. Martin call the "long black Sixties," a period when global Black Power advocates challenged a post-World War II liberal order that betrayed the promises of desegregation and decolonization. By comparison, little attention has been given to global visions of black freedom in the tumultuous decades that followed the U.S.

Civil War. And yet black internationalism was very much alive in that period. Haiti was its heart. For late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African Americans, Haiti demonstrated the opportunity that freedom presented: black self-determination (or black self-government), a malleable idea centered on the demand for individual and collective independence from the political, economic, and social structures that perpetuated white supremacy and limited the opportunities for black people to dictate their own lives. In fact, Haiti confirmed that self-determination and freedom went hand in hand, that the former was a necessary condition of the latter. Accordingly, even African Americans wh.