Content area
Full text
Toussaint's Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution. By Gordon S. Brown. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. xii, 321 pp. $32.00, ISBN 1-57806-711-1.)
This highly readable book is old-fashioned diplomatic history. Gordon S. Brown, a retired career foreign service officer, clearly relishes his role as storyteller. The book contains three separate, but intertwined, stories: the story of the Saint Domingue slave revolt that would become the Haitian Revolution, the story of the European wars that resulted from the French Revolution and its aftermath, and the story of the way in which the newly formed United States government participated in European affairs in the Caribbean. For those with limited exposure to these topics, the book provides a fine narrative synthesis. But for scholars who are engaged in the...