Content area
Full text
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...