Book Review of Proslavery Foreign Policy by Alfred N. Hunt

Journal of American History, December 2004, vol. 91, no. 3



A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic. By Tim Matthewson. (Westport: Praeger, 2003. xii, 159 pp. $64.95, ISBN 0-275-98002-2.)

As the first black republic in the world, Haiti has struggled against overwhelming odds to take its place in the international fraternity of nations. Born in blood and destruction and ignored as a legitimate nation for decades, Haiti has been the pariah of a Western world that for two centuries and for various reasons has isolated it from the international community. The specter of its slave past probably darkens its destiny more than that of any other nation that had to endure slavery in the Americas. This volume, authored by an independent researcher and scholar, is a useful addition to the slowly growing body of scholarship on Haiti and its influence on the Americas.
1

Tim Matthewson's focus, as the title implies, is an examination of early American foreign policy as it relates to the events in Haiti and the American reaction to it. His thesis, focused on a study of the first three presidents' administrations, is that "The first president formulated a pro-slavery policy toward the Haitian revolution that left a legacy of racism and white supremacy in most branches of the American government." While not surprising, this thesis is documented by Matthewson's use of primary governmental sources and perhaps an overreliance on a host of more general secondary works.
2

This volume will be of particular interest to the general reader, in part because the book is organized into many small bold-faced topics of only several pages each. While this facilitates consultation of any given topic, it also tends to break the narrative up into textbook-like bytes that give the impression that the subjects are being dealt with all too briefly.
3

In addition, this reader is skeptical about Matthewson's assertions that racism was solidified by the Washington administration's reactions to the Haitian revolution in 1791. Labeling American policy racist before the advent of institutionalized racism is reading history backwards and tends to obfuscate how racism developed historically over the antebellum period.
4

Racism, like all ideologies, develops and declines in specific historical contexts over time. It was man-made and clearly will probably take as long to abate as it did to develop. For instance, proslavery advocates were still debating the role of slavery in American society and the relationship between blacks and whites as late as the Virginia debates in 1831 and in the works of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Helper in the 1850s. Because Haiti was influential in the formation of early America and in the subsequent development of both racial theory and the reinforcement of the idea of white supremacy, however, this book is a useful addition to the question of the influence of the Haitian revolution on American history.
5

Alfred N. Hunt

State University of New York
College at Purchase
Purchase, New York

Book Review of Proslavery Foreign Policy by Doron Ben-Atar

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A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic
Ben-Atar, DoronThe Journal of Southern History
A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic

Byline: Ben-Atar, Doron
Volume: 71
Number: 1
ISSN: 00224642
Publication Date: 02-01-2005
Page: 146
Type: Periodical
Language: English

A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic. By Tim Matthewson. (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 2003. Pp. xii, 159. $64.95, ISBN 0-275-98002-2.)

Tim Matthewson skillfully examines the evolution of official United States policy toward the rebelling colony of Saint Domingue and, later, the independent state of Haiti. As the title of the book suggests, Matthewson argues that the protection of slavery was the organizing principle of American diplomacy in the Caribbean. The book goes beyond this familiar argument and explains policy shifts as reactions to the twists and turns of events on the island. Matthewson's analysis of the racially motivated American reaction calls into question any Eurocentric interpretation of the history of American foreign relations during the Wars of the French Revolution.

Just by placing Saint Domingue front and center, the book challenges the worn-out and hopelessly dated historical narrative of foreign relations during this period. It is indeed a pleasant surprise that a concise account by a 1970s student of Alexander DeConde who did not follow a career in academia can offer such a useful corrective to the standard synthesis of the period, Stanley Elkins's and Eric McKitrick's The Age of Federalism (New York, 1993). Our understanding of the era's turning points, from the Jay Treaty to the War of 1812, from the quasi-war with France to the Louisiana Purchase, is terribly incomplete when it is not placed in the context of the upheaval in Saint Domingue. Matthewson points out, for example, that James Stephen's 1805 War in Disguise, long considered a chauvinist anti-American pamphlet representative of the narrow interests of British mercantile houses, originated in Stephen's antislavery convictions and that his primary goal was "to eradicate the slave trade" (p. 123).

Matthewson does not draw an ideological distinction between Federalist and Jeffersonian policies. Policy differences, he persuasively argues, derived from sectional origins. Southerners George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison devised a foreign policy that protected slavery whereas northerner John Adams overlooked race and set out a policy of cooperation with the former slaves. Washington ordered that the treasury direct payments of the American debt to France toward the planters fighting the insurrection. Adams, on the other hand, appointed senior representative Edward Stevens the American liaison with Toussaint L'Ouverture and had the American navy gloriously fight side by side with former slaves. The Revolution of 1800 terminated Haitian-American cooperation. Jefferson replaced Stevens with a minor commercial agent and refused to have anything to do with the de facto governors of the island. Jefferson promised to give material support to Charles Leclerc's expedition that set out to re-conquer the island and restore slavery and, after that mission failed, embargoed American trade with Haiti.

There is one glaring gap in Matthewson's account. The book for the most part skips the crucial five years, 1793 to 1798, when former slaves struggled to define freedom on the island and fought against British invaders. During this era, L'Ouverture emerged as the leader of the rebellion and effective ruler of the island. Matthewson's solid rendering does not equal the movingly passionate prose of Michael Zuckerman's "The Power of Blackness: Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution in St. Domingue," in his wonderful collection of essays, Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley, 1993). Still, Matthewson has put together an interesting and informed analysis of the evolution of proslavery diplomacy as the cornerstone of foreign policy in the early republic.
AUTHOR_AFFILIATION
DORON BEN-ATAR

Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman

Center for Scholars and Writers

New York Public Library

Copyright Southern Historical Association Feb 2005

Book Review of Proslavery Foreign Policy by Manuel Barcia

Hispanic American Historical Review, May 2005

Book Reviews / International and Comparative

A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic.

By Tim Matthewson. Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. Notes. Bibliography.

Index. xii, 159 pp. Cloth, $64.95.



In recent years, important studies on the history of Saint Domingue and the Republic of

Haiti have rectified, to a great extent, our previous ignorance about many issues related

to this always-conflictive Caribbean territory. Tim Matthewson’s book constitutes a new

effort to shed light upon the foreign policies developed by the first American administrations

toward Saint Domingue and Haiti.



This ambitious book, written in an old-fashioned, solidly descriptive way, makes us

wonder why scholars nowadays prefer to privilege their science over their historical subjects.

Matthewson is, no doubt, a perfectionist writer with an unyielding knowledge of

early American political thought. The book attempts to provide us with insight into the

racial and geopolitical ideas of men such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas

Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. Matthewson’s delightful prose reconstructs a long gone

epoch in a way that stimulates our imagination and challenges our knowledge of

history.



This is a classic book of history from above: a masterpiece of diplomatic history that

deserves to be properly read and considered, both for its document-based background

and for many of the ideas the author bravely puts forth in its pages. Matthewson does

not hesitate to show the world the real motives behind the proslavery policy of the U.S.

founding fathers. Not satisfied with analytical chapters dedicated to each of the first

three American presidents, he also portraits their diplomatic and military foreign intrusions

that formed the basis of a foreign interventionist policy that would prevail and

grow throughout the following two centuries and reach colossal proportions in recent

times. As a matter of fact, Matthewson is so keen to make us understand this picture that

he entitles the seventh chapter of the book “The Triumph of Racism.”



Matthewson would have rendered a few things more comprehensible had he looked

at them from another perspective, however. One wonders, for example, why he did not

dedicate more pages to the economic and political impact that the refugees from Saint

Domingue had on the foreign policy of the early American presidents. This would have

been a groundbreaking contribution on a much-neglected topic. Perhaps Matthewson

could, in the future, dig deeper into the history of these refugees in order to give us a

more accurate picture not only of their impact on American politics but also of the ways

in which they transformed the idiosyncrasy of the American people.



Finally, I feel compelled to make a last critique of Matthewson’s book. Throughout

the study we are continuously confronted with the personalities and ideas of Washington,

Hamilton, Jefferson, and so on. We have been also shown reams of letters coming

and going from Paris to Philadelphia and from Port-au-Prince to London. Nevertheless,

not even once does Matthewson question what it is written in these letters. This, I must

say, has been my main trouble while reading the book. Giving the fact that these historical

actors were trying to achieve personal or national goals, I cannot see how we can take

everything they wrote without a certain degree of disbelief. Unfortunately, I did have the

feeling once and again that some of the characters portrayed throughout the text were

lying, hiding the truth, or misleading the recipients of their letters, following the own

personal—or their masters’—agendas.



Apart from this weakness, though, the author wisely directs us to the point where

he wants us to go. I confess that when I realized that I was close to finishing the book, I

felt the wistful emotion that accompanies the knowledge that something good is coming

to an end. Haiti is the forgotten member of our continental family. Any book, article,

paper, documentary, or film that addresses its history and reality is a priceless contribution,

not only to academics, but to the body of knowledge of a nation that has endured

two hundred years of isolation from the rest of the world. This is a book for everybody

with an interest in the history of the second independent republic of the Western Hemisphere.

Hopefully in the near future someone will translate this volume into French and

copies will be sent to each public and school library in Haiti. This would be a small, but

significant, contribution toward correcting that bicentennial isolation.



Manuel Barcia, University of Essex