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Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution, by Matthew J. Clavin. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. ISBN 978-08122-4205-8. 248 pp. $39.95 cloth.
In August 1801, newspapers in the U.S. began to report on a stunning turn of events in Saint-Domingue. The rebel slave leader Toussaint Louverture had promulgated a constitution, securing at the least the quasiindependence of the colony from France. For a couple years, American Federalists - the party of George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton - had embraced Louverture, the bane of the French Directory. The U.S. Congress went so far as to pass the Toussaint Clause in 1799, which protected the American merchant trade with Saint-Domingue despite an attempted French embargo.' The 1801 Constitution represented a radical escalation toward independence that caught both France and the U.S. off guard. The response from Paris is well known: Napoleon ordered his brother-in-law, Charles Victor Emmanuel Ledere, to invade the island, depose Toussaint, and reestablish slavery, the latter of which the Constitution of Saint-Domingue explicitly abolished. Reaction in the U.S. was more equivocal, bifurcated along party and regional axes. Federalists in the North continued to celebrate Toussaint. The great man had restored order, reestablished religion, and reinvigorated the plantation economy. Themselves deposed from power with the election of Republican Thomas Jefferson, Federalists looked to Toussaint as an extension of Washingtonian principles and a critique of mealy-mouthed, French-sympathizing Jeffersonians. By contrast, Democratic-Republicans North and South condemned Toussaint as a false prophet of the Republican creed. They saw his constitution as a power grab by a monstrous authoritarian - Toussaint had concentrated executive authority, naming himself governor for life, allowing him to appoint his own successor, and granting himself vast military, commercial, and juridical power. The American South feared that Toussaint's rise would bring race-warfare to the U.S.; they foresaw a second Saint Domingue and its attendant horrors on the horizon.2 This bivocal, partisan response set the table...