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