United States and the Haitian Revolution

Among many white Americans, this led to uneasiness, instilling fears of racial instability on its own soil and possible problems with foreign relations and trade between the two countries.

John Adams appointed Edward Stevens as US consul-general to Haiti to forge a closer relationship between the two nations and express US support for Louverture's government.

However, once the Haitian slave population emancipated itself, the US was reluctant to continue trade for fear of upsetting the evicted French on one hand and its Southern slaveholders on the other.

Despite this, there were anti-slavery advocates in northern cities who believed that consistency with the principles of the American Revolution — life, liberty and equality for all — demanded that the US support the Haitian people.

And for the southern planter class, it was a moment of enormous terror.The pure honor of the inspiration behind Toussaint Louverture, led to a nation of false hope thrive.

[8]: 23 Hamilton and Timothy Pickering convinced John Adams to appoint Edward Stevens as the United States consul-general in Saint-Domingue, which he served as from 1799 to 1800.

This was made difficult by the fact that Britain had occupied part of the colony from 1793 to 1798 in an attempt to capture Saint-Domingue and were also afraid of the Haitian Revolution leading to unrest among slaves in the British West Indies.

[13] On 13 June 1799, he signed a convention which led to an armistice among the three parties, giving protections to British and American ships from local privateers and allowing them to enter the colony and engage in free trade.

[14] In 1791, Thomas Jefferson talked about gradual emancipation of American slaves in his private correspondence with friends while publicly remaining silent on the issue.

[15] Louis Andre Pichon, the chargé d’affaires of France, felt that Jefferson would help to suppress enslaved resistance in Saint-Domingue due to his fears of similar unrest in among American slaves.

[16] Jefferson had wanted to align with the European powers in an effort to isolate Haiti, but was unsuccessful due to Britain's lack of interest in joining the proposed accord.

[21] In the South, white planters viewed the revolution as a large-scale slave revolt and feared that violence in Haïti could inspire similar events in the US.

According to historian Tim Matthewson, John Taylor's comments in the debate shows how white attitudes shifted in the south from one of reluctantly accepting slavery as a necessity, to one of seeing it as a fundamental aspect of southern culture and the slave-owning planter class.

It was taken as proof that "violence was an inherent part of the character of blacks" due to the slaughtering of French whites, and the authoritarian rule that followed the end of the revolution.