Book Review: Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance

Abstract

Ronald Angelo Johnson's book is reviewed.

Ronald Angelo Johnson , Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance (Athens and London : University of Georgia Press , 2014, $49.95). Pp. 264. isbn 978 0 8203 4212 2 .

Reviews

Although there are more general accounts of American-Haitian diplomacy in the colonial and antebellum periods, Ronald Angelo Johnson is the first to engage in detail with the remarkable relationship formed between the governments of John Adams and Toussaint Louverture in the last years of the eighteenth century. Johnson combines meticulous research with narrative flair to illuminate the dynamics and ambiguities of early American diplomacy. He argues that the Adams-Louverture alliance reflected the United States' pursuit of commercial and diplomatic power in an Atlantic world still dominated by France, Spain and Great Britain. This desire for national status coincided with the emergence of Haiti as the second independent republic in the western hemisphere. For a brief period between 1798 and 1800, American diplomatic, commercial and military agents effectively improvised their way to a pragmatic and productive relationship with their Saint Dominguan counterparts. The partnership was to be short-lived, however, abrogated by the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the cessation of the quasi-war with France, and the Haitian war of independence of 1802-3.

Johnson, a former diplomat, brings an insider's feel to his eloquent discussions of diplomacy in action, not least through his considered emphasis on the importance of key personalities. There are excellent portrayals of President Adams, Secretaries of State Timothy Pickering and John Marshall, and of Edward Stevens, the shrewd and perceptive consul-general in Saint Domingue. Silas Talbot and Christopher Raymond Perry, the American naval officers who cooperated with Louverture in 1799 to consolidate his authority in the south of Saint Domingue, also play a significant part in the story of transracial partnership. Johnson constructs a creditable thesis that men like Talbot and Perry contributed to a maritime culture of collaboration that could surpass the racial protocol of civilian interactions. It is Louverture, however, who stands apart as the man who transcended racial hostilities to create opportunities for Americans and Dominguans alike, all the while maintaining his position between the great powers of the Atlantic.

Throughout Diplomacy in Black and White, Johnson repeatedly emphasizes the symbolic significance of a multicultural relationship that overcame notions of racial hierarchy, and argues that the alliance "irrevocably altered the country's discussion of race" (12). Certainly, his diplomatic actors engage in a range of noteworthy cross-cultural interactions that circumvent contemporary racial convention, but these arguably reflect more the comportments of a small and idiosyncratic professional coterie than a general reinterpretation of racial ideologies. Most of the diplomatic agents were, unsurprisingly, selected for their experience of, or perceived ability to develop, cross-cultural relationships. Stevens, for example, had spent much of his career as a plantation doctor in the "cosmopolitan atmosphere" (70) of Christiansted in the Danish West Indies, while Talbot had previously spent two years as an agent for impressed seamen in the Caribbean. Louverture, too, was an exceptionally capable diplomatic personality, someone who even slaveholders from the southern United States "could identify with" and who "did not fit prejudiced stereotypes" (172).

Whether these unique individuals had a wider or enduring impact is impossible to ascertain from the narrow confines to which Johnson is restricted. Stevens is the only consular agent on Saint Domingue to whom we are introduced, and Louverture the only Saint Dominguan of colour who is discussed in any depth at all. We can have no way of knowing, then, the extent to which their example of cross-cultural cooperation was emulated by their colleagues and subordinates. Within a few years, the majority of the key personalities involved in crafting the Adams-Louverture alliance were no longer in position to shape either policy or political discourse. This pioneering partnership was not even subjected to debate during the election of 1800. It is something of a leap, then, to assume that the ultimately fruitless exertions of a small number of atypical diplomatic agents could significantly realign the conversation about race.

Although undoubtedly innovative, the Adams-Louverture alliance was just one element of the increasing capability of the United States to conduct expedient multicultural diplomacy, ranging from its dealings with Native American peoples through to its treaties with the Barbary States and, later, with Latin America. Nor were the United States the only power to recognize the expediency of developing cross-cultural relationships. Nonetheless, Diplomacy in Black and White addresses a hitherto neglected aspect of late eighteenth-century diplomacy that provides a compelling and thoughtful addition to the existing scholarship.