Haitian Revolutionaries Saved the United States From Napoleon.
By: Erik Russell
Tags: United States, Slavery, History, Napoleon Bonaparte, Haiti

Haitian Revolutionaries Saved the United States From Napoleon.

To paraphrase Abbé Sieyes’ revolutionary pamphlet, “What is the Third Estate?” Americans might ask and answer the following:

What does the United States owe Haiti?

The Nation!

What does it believe is owed?

Nothing.

What should it do for Haiti now?

Something!

If we are to establish the debt American world hegemony owes Haiti, we must defeat the myth of inevitable U.S. expansion West. Few in 1802 foresaw a United States of epic continent crossing proportions, based on the reality that the United States was now effectively hemmed in by the world’s top three military behemoths.

Contributor: Arrowsmith, Aaron, 1750–1823. Source: Library of Congress

The Strategic Situation.

In the North, the British prevented what many Americans saw as the inevitable addition of Canada to the United States. This was underlined in 1812 when a shambolic US invasion of Canada ended in a hail of musket fire and scalped American militia. In the South, from Florida to Patagonia and running northwest from Mexico to Northern California, a Spanish crescent dominated the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Yet neither Spain nor Britain worried the young United States as much as the newest and most potent power to the West: Napoleonic France.

Britain was still a century away from its military peak, while Spain was easily a century past its prime. Revolutionary France under First Consul Bonaparte was a different case entirely. Napoleon mated a boundless energy and unrivaled military genius to the seemingly bottomless resources of men and material extracted from France, Northern Italy, the Netherlands, and Western Germany. Already master of Europe by 1802, his ill-fated Egyptian Expedition had foreshadowed an ambition to compete for global mastery as well.

Few competitors were less prepared to contend with Napoleonic France at this time than the United States. Rather than a unified nation, the sixteen U.S. states reflected Plato’s description of the Greek states, as so many “frogs around a pond,” sharing a loose-knit culture. Despite a 35% increase in the US population in the previous decade, by 1800 that population was still a paltry 5.3 million.

France, by contrast, was the most populous nation in Europe with over 30 million residents. Years later, in 1812, when the United States struggled to form a 35,000 man army, Napoleon was fielding armies of 600,000 men.

The naval figures reflected an even greater discrepancy. At a time when the United States’ Congress had authorized the navy to build and operate a mere six frigates, France already had twenty-five of these vessels. Frigates were fast ships carrying 32 to 44 cannon. Although these six American ships were recognized as particularly well built, any frigate was outclassed by a Ship-of-the-Line bearing 45 to 144 cannon. Napoleon had twenty three of these superpower-defining floating fortresses. The U.S. had none.

The “Event”.

When France retroceded land in Tuscany to Spain in exchange for return of the vast Louisiana territory, a fledgling U.S. found the prospect of its own further expansion West as remote as ever. Napoleon did not take half measures: his objective was nothing less than to reinvigorate a powerful French military presence in the heart of North America.

Contributor: Carey, Mathew, 1760–1839. Source: Library of Congress

President Thomas Jefferson recognized the dire implications of the change in ownership. In a lament penned in 1802 he worried:

“[T]his little event, of France possessing herself of Louisiana … is the embryo of a tornado which will burst on the countries on both shores of the Atlantic and involve in its effects their highest destinies.”

Weeks later, Jefferson evidenced continued concern in a more strident letter:

“every eye in the US. is now fixed on this affair of Louisiana. Perhaps nothing since the revolutionary war has produced more uneasy sensations through the body of the nation.”

The Big Un-Easy.

Much of this unease was centered on control of New Orleans. The city alternatively facilitated or dammed all U.S. traffic flowing out via the Mississippi River. As late as 1800 President Jefferson still hoped the “feeble” Spanish Empire might sell him this vital city. However, the Franco-Spanish Treaty of Ildefonso deflated this optimism. Napoleon immediately threatened commercial guarantees the US had won from Spain in a recent war. A now French New Orleans, and its vast Louisiana territory stood poised to throttle American trade.

Contributor: Lafon, Barthélémy, 1769–1820. Source: Library of Congress

Napoleon forthrightly intended to use the fortified port city to reinforce the colony of Louisiana and arrest further American expansion. He could also, in effect, hold American trade hostage at will. Such a strategic position would have drastically changed the outcome of the recent Quasi War between France and the U.S. There was even fear the American states dependent on trading down the Mississippi might entirely secede from Jefferson’s humble republic for the glory of Napoleon’s. There was only one tiny pebble left on Bonaparte’s path to a French-American empire in 1802: Haiti.

Sugar and Death.

The western portion of the island of Hispaniola was ceded to France by Spain in 1697. The French named it Saint-Domingue. One hundred years later, this “Pearl of the Antilles” had become the most profitable colony in the world. By 1789, Haiti produced 40% of Europe’s sugar and 60% of its coffee.

This achievement bore a high cost in human lives and misery: it required 500,000 African slaves, hijacked and forced to toil under the most inhumane conditions imaginable. Each year, the Colonizers kidnapped and enslaved 40,000 new Africans to replace the dead, a practice deemed cheaper than feeding the enslaved enough calories to produce their own offspring. Most died within two to three years of arrival. The colonists forced the starving men and women found eating any sugar cane to wear a heavy, suffocating metal box on their heads while they labored in the Caribbean sun.

Contributor: Bellin, Jacques Nicolas, 1703–1772. Source: Library of Congress

Into this environment, news of the French Revolution struck as a thunderbolt.

False rumors that the King of France had abolished slavery sparked a massive slave revolt in 1791. Fearful the Spanish or the British would use the revolt to supplant France as the colonial power in Haiti, the French Directorate made manifest the false rumor of an end to slavery. This acceptance of a fait accomplis had the effect of briefly winning to France’s side the army of former slaves under the efficient command of General Toussaint Louverture. By 1798, both the British and the Spanish had been driven out of Haiti under the relentless attacks of General Toussaint, and his most reliable ally in combat with the Europeans: Yellow Fever.

Napoleon Unleashed.

The 1802 Treaty of Amien between Britain and France ended the Royal Navy’s blockade of French ports. Bonaparte’s enormous army and navy was now free to cross the Atlantic. To the terror of many in the United States, Napoleon’s gaze now fell firmly on North America. In order to supply and fund his planned empire on the Mississippi River, Bonaparte was determined to first disarm and then re-enslave all Haitian revolutionaries — the same soldiers France had cynically employed to fend off Britain and Spain in the name of a shared liberté. Toward this end, Napoleon sent his brother-in-law General Charles Leclerc with an astonishing 86 ships, and eventually 80,000 French and allied Polish soldiers.

An Alternative History.

It is significant to note that this force was adequate not just to re-enslave Haiti, but also to achieve its subsequent task of curtailing all further American expansion west of the Mississippi. Had Bonaparte successfully re-colonized Haiti we might now have four to six nations sharing North America rather than the familiar three:

In addition to a reinvigorated French Lousiana, Texas and California could have developed as independent nations, and as allies of France and Spain. Texas and California’s alliance or union with the United States would seem the least likely outcome in a world where France was the dominant regional power. After the defeat of Napoleon, a Britain concerned about American ambitions for Canada might have welcomed France’s help in containing American expansion.

Had Napoleon succeeded in landing his troops in New Orleans:

Would American slavery have ended earlier without the profits of sending the practice and its victims ever further west?

Or would slavery have survived past the eighteenth century due to France’s interdependence with Confederate states?

Would the Germans have won their wars for mastery of Europe in the nineteenth century?

Would they be masters of the world, and forge it in their notorious image?

The Dog that didn’t Bark.

Miraculously for the United States these questions can be buried alongside the 75,000 French enslavers, and 200,000 Haitian revolutionaries who died, refusing to be disarmed and re-enslaved. By 1804 Napoleon was forced to abandon his dreams of a French American Empire. He cut his losses and sold the entirety of French Louisiana to fund a new war with Britain. His customer, a shocked but elated President Jefferson purchased sufficient land to form 15 additional U.S. states. The Louisiana territory opened a critical path to the Pacific Ocean and eventually deep into sovereign Mexico.

The Haitians were 5000 miles away from the heart of the French Revolution but were perhaps alone in the world in understanding what any enlightened revolution should have meant for the institution of slavery — an understanding Americans could not or would not grasp until they too lost hundreds of thousands killed at the hands of another slaving power.

So when Americans ask what obligation, if any, do we still owe these defiant islanders, the answer must be: Something!

Indeed, we may owe them the nation.