“In close alliance”: How the early American republic and revolutionary Saint-Domingue made their way in a hostile Atlantic world
Abstract
This dissertation represents an attempt to understand the diplomatic gestures made between the administrations of President John Adams and Governor-General Toussaint Louverture from 1798 to 1801 against the backdrops of Atlantic world revolutions and American slavery. The President and his cabinet established bilateral ties that constitute the first time the United States recognized a government leader of the African Diaspora as a de facto head of state. They committed American governmental, military, and economic resources to the Saint-Dominguan Revolution that spawned the independent nation of Haiti. The United States government encouraged the revolutionaries' determined stride to secure liberty and their drive to become the second republic on the Atlantic world's western flank. Bilateral interaction between American and Dominguan officials of color spawned exceptional levels of interracial and cross-cultural cooperation between peoples of different complexions. Historical investigation, biography, critical race theory, and sociological analysis reveal that the actors in this diplomatic drama found inspiration for their part of the mission from different sources. The proposal that white Americans of the early republic embraced the independence of Africans in Diaspora represents an interpretative shift in the historiography. The study employs Dominguan-American diplomacy as a lens through which to address larger subjects of Atlantic world brinksmanship, anomalous racial relationships, and Federal-era political gamesmanship. The late eighteenth-century engagement of the United States with revolutionary Saint-Domingue represents a critical historical encounter with far-reaching consequences in the early Atlantic. In its entirety, the story of Dominguan-American relations is a multilayered narrative about a young white nation's struggle for political stability, a revolutionary multiracial colony's struggle for political survival, and the pioneering steps that two governments took to buttress each other, in an effort to advance their respective Atlantic world aspirations.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Lambert, Purdue University.
Subject Area
African American Studies|Black history|American history|International Relations
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