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Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance RONALD ANGELO JOHNSON Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014 241 pp.
US historians of the colonial and Revolutionary eras have realized the need to eschew parochial celebrations of American exceptionalism and to situate historical developments within a wider (the buzzword is "Atlantic") context. More specifically, US debates on race and slavery in the 1790s were directly inspired by the events of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). In his classic From Rebellion to Revolution (1979), Eugene Genovese used that revolution as the pivotal moment when slave resistance in the Americas transitioned from narrowly focused uprisings aimed at escaping the plantation world to full-fledged revolts that challenged the very notion of human bondage. Early America may have been a "city upon a hill," but it did not develop in isolation from neighboring towns.
A field that lends itself particularly well to cross-national approaches is foreign policy, especially since the early US Republic was not yet a hegemon and it had to contend with the demands of its partners. Scholarly interest in the diplomatic relations between the United States and Haiti (known before 1804 as French Saint-Domingue) goes back to the 1930s, following a nineteen-year US occupation of Haiti. Early works included Charles Tansill's The United States and Santo Domingo (1938), Ludwell Montague's Haiti and the United States, 1714-1938 (1940), Rayford W Logan's Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti (1941), and Alexander DeConde's The Quasi-War (1966). These authors embraced the traditional approach dominant at the time, both in style and substance: readers were treated to a series of diplomatic dispatches written by great men eager to defend national security interests for the greater good of the country.
The culture wars inherited from the 1960s did not leave the field untouched. As part of a larger reassessment of the Founding Fathers and their involvement in plantation slavery, revisionists denounced their policies toward the Haitian Revolution. According to Tim Matthewson's A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic (2003) and Gary Wills's "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power (2003), US policymakers were motivated at best by their financial interests and at worst by their racist impulses. Those two factors overlapped when it...